


Song of the Open Road

by fullborn



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, Post-Series, boyd gets out of prison
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2019-10-09 13:22:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 48,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17407697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullborn/pseuds/fullborn
Summary: She put the phone back on its cradle, and thought: With Boyd Crowder it was never a question of if, only of when. Somehow, he was always going to get out.Chief Deputy Rachel Brooks sighed, picked the phone up again and began to dial the Florida office.





	1. Chapter 1

  

> _ But ‘Thou Mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he still has the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win. _
> 
> ** John Steinbeck,  East of Eden  **

 

* * *

  

 _He sits there in quiet disbelief as he absorbs the implication of the judge’s words, while around him the room empties, abuzz with the rustle of jackets and coats and throats cleared. There is no one he knows there to meet his eye. An odd feeling after all these years to be surprised, a man resigned and almost comfortable in the knowledge of his future. No swell of jubilation or victory as they escort him past the hardbacked benches— just the question settling heavy in his chest, constricting as the shackles on his wrists. _ Why now?

 

* * *

 

 

** 10.40AM. U.S. MARSHAL’S OFFICE. SEATTLE. | A Conversation Between Two Old Friends**

 

_ ‘Hey, Chief Brooks. How’re things on the Eastern seaboard?’ _

‘Hi, Tim. As much as I love hearing your voice, your calls are about as rare as bleu steak. You have any reason to be calling me up or do you just miss me?’

_ ‘Aw hell, your Seattle fiefdom keeping you too busy to chat with an old friend? For shame.’ _

‘Come out to Seattle like I asked and you can talk about old times all you want.’

_ ‘It’s not my fault I’m the only one without ambition. I just love this hillbilly shit too much to leave Kentucky; why the other week I was chasing this fugitive and he decides to hide out in — I swear to God — a slurry pit, cause why the hell not? I still smell like a cow’s asshole and didn’t get so much as a thank you for saving that sorry piece of shit from drowning in an even greater pile of shit.’ _

‘Charming.’

_ ‘You’re missing out. And speaking of good old times…You wanna hear the reason I called?’ _

‘This better be good, Gutterson.’ 

_ ‘Oh, you have no idea.’ _

‘Let’s hear it, Mister "Cat That Got The Cream And Then Shat All Over The Bed". You are so making that dumb face right now.’

_ ‘Well, Supreme Leader Brooks, would it excite you terribly if I mentioned the words  _ Boyd _ and  _ Crowder _in the same sentence? Cause I know that somewhere in Florida Raylan Givens’ dick just got hard.'  _

‘I’m sorry Tim, what year is it again? This is giving me flashbacks to times when I wasn’t in charge.’ 

_ ‘Happier times, huh?’ _

‘If the next words out of your mouth aren’t reassuring phrases like _It’s nothing, Boyd Crowder sent me a birthday card from prison_ or _Boyd Crowder got shanked in prison_ or anything that isn’t _Boyd in Prison_ themed, I swear to God…’

_‘Oh Rachel, I hate to disappoint, but what with me still being in Kentucky I reckon that’s a given. But how else would I inform you of such thrilling developments as those which I am about to relate? Sit down in whatever large authoritative chair you have at hand cause this is a wild ride.’  _

‘I’m already sitting down. In my big-ass office…Get going.’

_‘Geez, okay. So, Boyd Crowder’s sitting in Tramble Penitentiary looking down fifteen years apiece for Markham & Co and attempted murder of a constable? As well as thirty for the murder of that dude in the truck, Hagan, and all these sentences are running concurrently because of the state’s infinite mercy.’ _

‘I was there, Tim. I know all this: dead guy in the hospital charge didn’t stick. Boyd’s word against that crooked deputy.’

_ ‘Funny how he died from an allergic reaction before he could wake up an’ place blame, wasn’t it? Who knew medical malpractice could be so humorous? Anyway: all this establishing that Boyd Crowder is as slippery as a lubed-up bar of soap on an ice rink.’ _

‘Nice.’

_ ‘It’s my poetic soul. Here’s where it gets exciting: turns out the guy in the truck, Tom Hagan…wait for it….died a good thirty years ago! Whaaaat? So he’s in prison for killing a guy that’s already dead!’ _

‘But there’s still a dead body to be accounted for, courtesy of Boyd. Does it matter who he is?’

_' Good lord you’re a tough crowd; this shit is the most exciting read I’ve had in years. Dead guy is actually an ex-con by the name of Hut McKean: Tennessee originally, served twenty-two years for drug running and all kinds of nasty shit, supposedly went on the straight-and-narrow, living quietly in Harlan for ten years before Brother Boyd came and blew his head off.’_

_‘Hmm.'  _

_ ‘Damn straight. Sounds like he and Boyd shoulda hit it off, but alas it was not to be. Thing is, we only got the drop on the whole Hagan-as-McKean thing cause this guy shows up a couple’a weeks back claiming to be his son, says that he killed his old man — not Boyd. I gather from your silence that this is shocking beyond belief.’ _

‘You’re shitting me.’

_ ‘’Fraid not. And he’s not just talking outta his ass: he knows the details. Shot location, Boyd’s stolen gun as the weapon, the works. Says he was in the truck with ‘em.’ _

‘Court’s listening to this guy?’

_‘Yup. Whole thing’s bust wide open all over again. Leaving us with Boyd, twelve years served and some good time all adding up to a parole meeting which they had just this morning.’  _

‘And?’

_ ‘The son of a bitch is getting out.’ _

‘…I don’t know what I expected. You told Raylan yet?’

_ ‘Raylan? If I were to mention his old buddy Boyd Crowder getting out of the pen his hard-on would come bursting into the office all the way from Florida. It’s a hazard. Someone could get killed. Leaves my conscience clearer to let him find out on his lonesome.’ _

‘That the second allusion you’ve made to Raylan’s dick, one more strike and I hang up.' 

_ ‘Yes ma’am. And anyway, he missed Art’s Seventieth Birthday Bash Slash Fourth of July Bonanza so frankly he deserves what’s coming to him.’ _

‘So did I.’

_‘Well, at least you have the grace to be less of an asshole about it. And distance makes the heart grow fonder, etcetera etcetera.’  _

‘Warm and fuzzy doesn’t suit you, idiot. And wouldn’t it make more sense to warn Raylan rather than me, seeing as he’s the one Boyd has literally threatened to kill?’ 

_ ‘Naw, Raylan’s a big boy, and apparently prison and a booster shot of Jesus has mellowed Boyd out — why, he’s practically nice according to a rapturous parole board.’ _

‘Heaven help us.’ 

_‘Not to mention that he might be in your neck of the woods soonish. Requested parole transfer to whatever state’ll take him as far from his home turf as possible. It’s looking like the East Coast.’  _

‘Why not Alaska?'

_ ‘Life doesn’t give you what you want: example, Boyd Crowder dying inside a state prison.’ _

‘I was having such a nice morning.’

_ ‘One day at a time, Sweet Jesus. Nevertheless, but you can’t deny that you’ve got the beginnings of a good ol’ Marshal stiffy right now, admit it.’ _

‘Nice talking to you, Tim! I’m hanging up now.’ 

 _ ‘You said allusions to Raylan’s dick! That was an allusion to  _ all _ of our dicks, figurative and not so fig-’ _

‘- That’s great. Bye Tim!’

_ ‘Rachel! Make sure to give Boyd my love!’ _

  

* * *

 

 _She put the phone back on its cradle, and thought:_ With Boyd Crowder it was never a question of if, only of when. Somehow, he was always going to get out.  _Chief Deputy Rachel Brooks sighed, picked the phone up again and began to dial the Florida office._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been working at this some time and thought I'd start to post some chapters as a way to incentivise myself to finish it, it being my first multi-chapter fic and all - and I was surprised by the lack of post-series fics out there. Comments of any kind appreciated!


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

 

> _ Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. _
> 
> ** Flannery O'Connor,  Wise Blood  **
> 
>  

* * *

 

 

The gates of Tramble Penitentiary clanged shut with great finality. The man lifted his face to the weak sun; it was a good thing to be a free man under God’s open sky for the first time in twelve years, three months, and fifteen days, with nothing in the world but the cheap prison-supplied clothes on his back, a bus ticket, well-thumbed bible and his own disreputable name.

‘Well, hallelujah,’ he murmured. With the sky looming grey and thunderous above, his upturned palms looked like an invitation for lighting, or rain. A man waiting at the parked sedan across the carpark raised a hand and Boyd Crowder, free and unhurried, made his way over.  ‘Anyone ever told you that you’re a damn good lawyer?’ he said to Billy "Wild Man" Geist as they shook hands. 

‘It’s been mentioned. Congratulations — how does it feel to be a free man again?’

‘Hell, it’s only been thirty seconds so I’ll have to get back to you ‘bout that. Somewhat longer in the tooth than when I went in, but otherwise? Peachy.’ His hand drew Geist’s eyes as he braced it against the roof getting into the car. 

‘You know I could have gotten you a good settlement for that,’ Geist said as the engine purred to life. ‘There was money to be made.’

Boyd watched silently as the high barbed-wire covered walls of his home of over a decade receded into the rear-view mirror. ‘There’s always money to be made. I ain’t so sure I’ve gotta be the one making it.’

Harlan County slipped past them as they travelled the road to Lexington. Boyd wondered at what had changed, what hadn’t — the countryside damn near the same, hills and hollers set to outlast the folk that settled there. Empty houses and patches of wild, untended land pocked the landscape like ghost-traps. He watched them go by; clearly people were moving in slow dregs out of the town, the mines and blood not ties enough to keep them. Betraying the land alongside them left a bitter taste in his mouth, but both the mine and Crowder blood were all dried up for Boyd, each having tried to keep him and put him in the Harlan ground for good. He was getting out. Thirty years too late perhaps, but he was getting out. 

The final proof was half overgrown and rusting on the roadside but even so, he saw it: _Leaving Harlan County_. The sign weathered and worn and gone too fast. And for the first time in his life Boyd Crowder left his birthplace and erstwhile kingdom without any intention of ever coming back.

 

* * *

 

Geist dropped him in the car park of a Walmart opposite the bus station in Lexington. He gave Boyd a brown paper envelope, a parting comment, and his hand to shake one last time before he drove away; ‘It sounds cold, but I hope to not see you for some time Mr. Crowder. But if you need me, you know where to find me.’ 

‘Thank you for the ride. You’re a good man, Mr. Geist.’

‘I don’t know about that, but you’re welcome all the same. And remember, you have three days to check in with your new P.O. before they come looking for you.’

Boyd waited until Geist was gone before heading into Walmart. The store was so huge, and so peopled that he took a moment to absorb it all and remind himself that no one was likely to stab him in the back, that he could choose what he wanted — even if that choice felt somewhat obscene.  A blonde girl in an employee shirt appeared, summoned by his momentary idleness. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ 

He couldn’t help it, this made him bare his teeth in a grin. ‘Nobody’s called me _sir_ for twelve years, miss. I’m out of the habit of it.’

The girl’s cheery composure slipped a notch. ‘I’m sorry?’ she asked, a little unsure, pink rubber bands stretching between her braces. Still in high school.

‘Oh nothin’,’ said Boyd. ‘Let’s start over: yes, you can direct me to what I need in this vast temple of Mammon.’ Then seeing her glazed confusion he simply listed his needs, whereupon she brightened and led him into the store. 

He thanked the girl and picked out a canvas rucksack with buckles, filled it with food for the road: packets and bottles and boxes of whatever took his fancy. A wristwatch and torch. Aspirin. A rolled blanket. In the clothes isle he chose two shirts, one flannel and one light denim, a dark blue corduroy jacket and a packet of cheap black socks. Lastly, he kicked off the prison’s cheap canvas rubber-soled shoes and tried on a pair of steel-capped boots. They felt good and heavy and purposeful, so he bought them and the rest of his supplies using cash from the paper envelope. 

The tennis shoes he dumped atop a bin, figuring if someone wanted them they’d take them.

According to an electronic billboard across the street he still had a half-hour before his bus, so he set the wristwatch to match and strapped it to his wrist before setting off down the road where the signs from identical fast food chains flashed invitingly, vying against each other for his business and convenience.  But he grinned to himself and entered Dairy Queen instead, so as to exercise the free man’s right to buy a Pecan Cluster Blizzard from amongst a menu of equally tooth-rotting things. The ice cream tasted cool and good and a little too sweet, and he ate it under the darkening sky outside the Greyhound station.  

Along the road people walked, going no where in particular. He felt prison clinging to his back, drawing his eyes to posture, pitch, expression — not that he needed prison to make him watchful, but it sure honed the skill. A dark car sat across the road. He finished his ice cream, casually crossed to a bin and stood for a moment looking at the car. Windows tinted. He sat back down with his bag between his feet and waited. 

The bus pulled into the station just before the storm clouds broke. Boyd glanced over at the car as he stood in line waiting for some teenagers to heave their bags onto the bus, and saw that the window was now rolled down. He boarded the bus with a deliberate wave to the man in the sunglasses and from within the car, Deputy Marshal Tim Gutterson nodded back. 

 

* * *

 

 

They stopped once on the way to Louisville. Now the rain hit the blacktop in heavy repetition, and Boyd sat watching the rivulets of water form tributaries and spilling paths down the juddering window. A woman got on, hood and shoulders darkened with rain; he paid no particular heed as she bought a ticket and moved up the bus until she was standing over him asking, ‘Mind if I sit here?’

She took off her hood and he slowly straightened, puts his two feet on the floor. ‘You’re more then welcome,’ he said, and all-grown-up Loretta McCready sat down next to him. 

She was on the cusp of it before, but now he noted that she had settled into adulthood as if something claimed, claimed like Harlan’s weed industry and more: with grit and determination and level-headedness. He had always liked Loretta, but the distance from the teenager he had known and the woman sitting beside him was stretched too great for him to be fully at ease.  ‘Mr. Crowder,’ she said, low and deferential, gaze clearly taking his measure while he did the same to her. She wore jeans and a flowing top under her soaked parka, silver rings on her fingers. 

‘Ms. McCready. Always a pleasure.’

‘Now Mr. Crowder, I ain’t here to spring upon a man as he fixes to reacquaint himself with the free world, but what with you headin’ outta state I figured I ought to get my words in when I could. Pardon the intrusion.’

‘I don’t think that I have any right to complain, seein’ as it was you that sprung me in the first place. Unless you’re here to tell me otherwise.’ 

Loretta looked at him, long and hard. ‘I ain’t.’ 

‘Now, ordinarily I’d say that confession of sin is good and proper, in helping us acknowledge our own sin and therefore bringing us closer to a gracious God,’ Boyd said. ‘But I could not help but stay silent, so strong was my curiosity as to why that fellow went and claimed my sin all by his lonesome. Unless of course there were bigger powers at play, meanin’ you.’ 

‘I’m glad you did. That woulda been an terrible waste of my time.’ 

‘Well in that case, you have my thanks. Although I’m sure that’s not all you want from me.’ 

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Always a cost,’ said Boyd, spreading his fingers out to show his right hand  with the two absent fingers , the scarring. ‘I may be free from confinement, but I am tied to you for what you have done — now and at the trial.’

He remembered how young Loretta got up in front of the court and before God, and lied to lessen his sentence. How she swore that she had seen the shootout, that Boyd had killed Markham and his man in self-defence — and if her voice had been somewhat deadpan and detached, well, the jury had marked that down to trauma. Her youth and gender were incorruptible and she was giving them such a lurid story after all: 

_Well Boon took me out a that shed, but we didn’t head to Compass Rock straight away. Boon, y’see, he was kinda sweet on me and so the moment we was alone he pressed me up against that barn. I could see inside through a gap in the timber, so I focused on that while he was feelin’ around and…so forth. And I saw Mr. Crowder come on into the barn with one’a them deputies just as Markham was about to beat on Ms. Crowder. And he pointed his gun and told Markham to quit, and Markham and the other deputy pointed their guns. And he said, ‘Let her go,’ and Markham says ‘Like hell,’ and fires on him. Crowder shot back in self-defence. Then Boon heard the shots and grabbed me and pulled me to the truck, and we must’a just pulled away when the Marshal got there._ All this like gospel. 

She had saved him then and she has saved him now, but for no better reason then to put him in her debt. A powerful thing, having a man in one’s debt. 

‘You’re right about that,’ said Loretta. ‘Make no mistake, you owe me.’ She handed Boyd an envelope from her jacket pocket and he took it, inside a burner phone and a driver license in his name. ‘You’re heading west, I respect that — but nevertheless I will call on you. It may not be for some time, but I expect you to answer and I expect you to come when I ask.’ _Back to Harlan County._ ‘You help me out, I count us even.’  

Boyd looked at the cheap plastic tying him to Loretta McCready and Kentucky, and pocketed it. Didn’t say anything about leaving Harlan behind him, how he won’t hold a gun for her or kill for her. There’s no point. A debt is a debt. ‘I understand.’

Loretta’s eyes held him steadily. ‘Good.’ 

Boyd flipped the license. Everything was correct: the picture recent, from his file. ‘This legal?' 

‘It is. I helped speed up the bureaucratic process is all, pulled in a favour at the DMV. Think of it as insurance.’ 

‘So I ain’t got no reason not to put foot to pedal when you call.’

‘That’s one way of lookin’ at it.’

The roadverge blending into one big strip of grey and white and tired green, an old lady coughing in the front of the bus. ‘And that boy?’ said Boyd in low challenge. ‘The son? I can’t say it eases me to think why you took the trouble to trade his life for mine.’

‘I got my reasons,’ said Loretta, her voice flat as a pebble and her eyes just as hard. ‘Let’s just say he had a debt to owe.’ 

They sat in silence for a while. After a reasonable stretch of road had passed Boyd asked, ‘How’s business?’ 

‘Good. First couple’a years were hard. Had some thugs from the south try to muscle in ‘round the time the legalisation bill was being passed, but they were...dealt with. Since then there hasn’t been much trouble.’ 

‘You’re not so young anymore.’

A narrow smile crossed Loretta’s face. ‘That helps.’

‘Does it help Harlan? Like we saw it could?’ 

‘I keep things local. We got Harlan folk tending the land and crop, from their own homes, for a fair living. It works. We got fields from Wallins Creek to West Virginia. Harlan ain’t ever been thriving exactly, but this keeps people in town and in work when the mines are dyin’ all over.’ 

‘You inherited a lot of blood, girl, but I’m glad you made something out of it. And with less violence too, I reckon.’ 

‘Y’all set a low bar.’  

‘Wasn’t a lie when they said the Future Is Female. You got someone you can trust?’

She looked at him then, calculating, no doubt seeing Ava and the bullet hole she left in his chest.  ‘Yes. I’m pretty sure I do.’

He nodded. ‘That’s good.’

When the rain let up the bus was nearing the Indiana state line. Boyd peered out at the buildings rising in size as the city drew closer, taking in the suburban sprawl. ‘Louisville already. My, my, a body does get around.’ 

‘That a quote from somethin’?’ 

‘That’s right. Dead southern fellow.’

‘There’s a lot’a those around.’ 

They parted ways at the bus station; she back to Lexington and then Harlan, he to Indianapolis, Denver, Portland. Westward.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boyd is quoting Light in August by William Faulkner.
> 
> It's a hot take when the first series character to show up is ponytail-lawyer rather than Raylan, I know. As always, comments always appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

> _ "You have to help me think things through, Glory." _
> 
> _ "Does that mean remembering that you're disreputable?" _
> 
> _ "'Fraid so." _
> 
> _ "I think you're imagining." _
> 
> _ "It is the central fact of my existence," he said. "One of three, actually. The one you have to help me keep in mind." _
> 
> _ "Well, really, Jack. How on earth am I supposed to do that?" _
> 
> _ He laughed. "Don't be so kind to me," he said. _
> 
> **Marilynne Robinson, Home**  
> 

 

* * *

 

It was near the end of his shift when Willard Jackson noticed the stranger at the lumber mill. This ought to have been unremarkable except visitors rarely came up the bumpy forest path to the mill, and the ones that did never looked like his guy; there was something about the way he held himself, reserved and intent, strangely at odds with the way his hair was sticking up like an ageing punk or victim of electrocution.  Will marked the 2x12s with blue spray paint and watched as the stranger talked to Gabe the foreman. Even over the rattling machinery he could tell that the man wasn’t local, or from anyplace in Oregon for that matter. Southern maybe. He listened.  

‘I’m looking for employment in these parts,’ said the stranger. ‘And Potts’ Lumber Mill is one of the places on my list that is somewhat ambiguous concernin’ the hirin’ of violent felons. If you’ve got any positions I’d be mighty appreciative.’  

‘Ah,’ said Gabe, the words _violent_ and _felon_ almost visibly pin-balling inside the old man’s skull. ‘Hmm.’ 

‘I worked as a powder-man and driller in the coal mines back home. I’m used to dangerous work and equipment.’ 

‘Look, Mr. Crowder,’ Gabe said, twirling his hard-hat nervously in his hands, ‘there just aren’t jobs going spare at the minute. Machines able to do more and more each year, I barely have enough for the men here to do. And I had’ta train them. We just don’t have the opening.’

‘Well thank you for your time, Mr. Lawrence.’

‘Only jobs are chainsawing, and I couldn’t put you cutting lumber without full use of your hands. And it doesn’t look good, man missing fingers at a saw mill. You know how it is.’

Crowder paused. ‘I see. That’s quite all right.’ 

To his credit, Gabe was shamefaced. ‘Fellow named Harry Davis is taking folks out to Saginaw for harvesting over the weekend, let me give you his number. I got it here.’ He fumbled with his smartphone and Crowder keyed the number into a cellphone that looked better suited to hammering nails than sending messages. 

‘I better get back to hunting,’ said Crowder as he shook Gabe’s hand with his mutilated one, ‘Thank you for your time.’ Gabe jammed his hard-hat back on his head and limped away. Crowder stood for a moment, looking after him with his hands in his coat pockets like a site surveyor. He turned to go.

‘Hey, hold on a minute,’ called Will, and Crowder stopped. White boy out of prison no doubt taking in the big black fella approaching and wondering whether or not to bounce. But Crowder surprised Will by raising his eyebrows instead, cool as anything, mildly-interested like. 

‘I was just observing,’ Crowder said, ‘that the trees growin’ here are something else. Where I’m from, we got plenty of oaks but none of these fine firs. Smell a’them does the soul good.’ He breathed in and exhaled, exaggerated. ‘What can I do for you?’ 

‘I hear correctly you’re looking for a job?’

‘That’s right.’  

‘You wait till the end of my shift, I can take you to see someone about that. A place comes to mind.’

‘You hear that bit about my being fresh outta the pen?’ asked Crowder, flashing a whitetoothed grin. ‘Doesn’t fill out the resumé like you’d expect.’

‘Yeah, I think that’ll be alright with who I got in mind.’

‘That’s awful mighty of ‘em,’ said Crowder. ‘So they’re gonna be okay with you showin’ up ex-con in tow, askin’ if you can keep him?’

Will found himself liking the man and knew that Sarah would like him even more.‘The boss got a thing for strays. You could say I know her pretty well,’ he said. ‘She’s my wife.’

 

* * *

 

They pulled into the incorporated city of Oakridge just after six that evening. It had a transitory air, bisected as it was by both the Southern Pacific Railroad and Route 58, leaving roads wide for logging trucks to pass through and the rattle of the railway audible from the valley’s solitary high school: a place with low boxy shops odd-fronted with weathered brick, not remarkably unalike the other small towns in the valley. But it was the only one Will called his home. 

‘Thought I might have lost you on those backroads,’ he said, leaning on his truck as Crowder pulled in beside him driving a pick-up that barely passed as a vehicle. ‘That is one hell of a rust-bucket.’

‘Cost me a grand total of $500, so forgive me if it ain’t pure racing stock,’ Crowder said, having to put his back into it as he slammed the dented door shut. ‘And yesterday’s the first time I touched any car in years, let alone one with a stick shift. We got some reacquainting to do.’ 

‘Damn. Rather you than me.’ Will hitched up his overalls. ‘We only have the one car, so I usually pick Sarah up after my shift when she’s finished tidying up. Here.’

He rapped twice on the glass door of a shop with striped awning and an empty pastry display case in the window. The bakery inside was dark except for the backlit counter, and the glass reflected the men’s distorted figures back at them. They waited a moment. A petite woman with shorn dark hair opened the door with a rattling of keys, and grinned up at Will.

‘Hey babe,’ said Will, leaning down to kiss his wife on the head — she was so small he had to bend at the waist to reach her tufted head with his jaw. 

‘I’ll just be a minute,’ she said, untying a brown apron from her waist and retreating back into the dark shop. Will followed, leaving Crowder on the threshold watching with a closed politeness. ‘Man, come in,’ Will said, flipping a light-switch and the place brightened. Crowder blinked.

Sarah looked up from where she was bent under the counter and saw the stranger for the first time. ‘Who’s this, Will?’

‘This here is Boyd Crowder. Boyd, this is my wife Sarah.’ 

Crowder entered, carefully extending his hand. Sarah came forward and shook it firmly without batting an eyelid, like she manoeuvred social niceties around men with horribly avulsed digits all the time.‘Good to meet you,’ she said. 

‘Ma’am,’ Crowder said. ‘Pleasure’s all mine.’

‘Shit, either I’ve turned ninety without realising it or you’re from the south, Mr. Crowder.’  

‘No further south than Harlan, Kentucky,’ he said, playing it rueful. 

‘Huh, how about that. That’s a fair distance from here.’ 

Will got to the point, catching his wife’s eye. ‘Boyd came up to the sawmill today looking for a job, and I told him I thought I could get him an interview someplace I knew.’

‘Oh you did, did you? _Someplace_ meaning here? All right then,’ Sarah said, flipping metal backed chair around. ‘Mister Crowder, please sit down.’  Will leaned back against the backlit counter, containing a smile as Crowder sat opposite his wife and the impromptu interview began. 

Sarah, business-face on: ‘So, Boyd Crowder, you’re looking for a job.’

Crowder straightened his buttoned collar, considering. ‘That’s right. Been looking all day, but nobody willing to hire a man on parole. Figure that’s an important place to start, the crux of the matter. I got outta prison not four days ago.’

Sarah arched her eyebrows, leaned back. ‘You certainly get straight to it.’

‘Prospective employer has the right to know my record and judge accordingly.’ 

‘You haven’t been judged already?' 

‘Only judgment that matters is the Lord’s,’ said Crowder, brows lowered and serious, ‘but in the meantime everyone else’s free to make whatever pronouncements they see fit. I got no control of that.’  

‘Fair enough. What’s your employment history like?’ asked Sarah, eyes bright. Will knew that she was enjoying this sure as shit.

‘Mined for three years straight outta high school, and a brief spell back in twenty-ten. Drilling and setting charges mostly, and some plain labouring. Owned a bar for a few years, so I was…self-employed around then.’ 

‘How was business?’

‘Not too bad. Had a couple of fellas working for me, kept the right stock and the right paperwork, not too shabby. I lost the bar when I went inside.’ 

‘So you're used to providing service to the consumer as well as working the primary sector?’  

‘You could say that.’ This sounded pretty ambiguous to Will, but Sarah didn’t press it.  

‘Do you have any experience with either cooking or baking?’ 

The image of Crowder, alone, rustling up something sweet and southern in a baking storm was ridiculous and yet somehow strangely imaginable to Will. Crowder said, ‘Can cook for myself alright but I’m no whizz; did a stint in the mess hall for a spell. Haven’t had much reason to try my hand at baking.’ 

‘Well, they say cooking’s an art but baking is a science.’  

‘In that case maybe I’d have a flair for it. I’m pretty good at measuring out material a great deal less forgiving than flour from my days as a powderman,’ he said easily. 

Sarah flipped open a notepad and scribbled a few notes in pencil. ’I’m feeling inclined to put you on a test run, see how you learn. Now, the baking and the drinks are only half the work — the rest is being able to deal with people. That’s why I have this place; we get all sorts in here, from truckers to old women to kids, and I like what we’ve got. It’s special, understand?’  

‘Yes ma’am.’ 

Sarah stood, satisfied. ‘But before I give anyone a job I prefer to have a drink with them or, not to presume you're a drinking man, a meal. Will, we got enough stew in the slow-cooker for three?’ 

‘Yeah,’ he answered, ‘I think so.’ 

She nodded. ‘Alright Boyd, consider yourself invited for dinner.’ 

His poker face slipped a little. ‘I appreciate your goodwill…but ain’t you going to ask?’ he said, standing upright to look her full in the face.

‘Ask what?’

‘What I did time for? Strikes me as somewhat reckless, not knowing what kinda man you're inviting into your home.’ 

‘Well, I’ll bite. What did you do?’

Crowder squared his shoulders, keeping his voice level like he was reading the headline off the news. ‘Three counts of murder, one attempted. I killed people. And more.’

They all stood looking at each other, the confession taking up space in the room until it was hard to ignore. _Murder,_ thought Will. _Well, shit._ Crowder held his hands at his sides, blank and waiting. The silence stretched on until Sarah said, ‘Okay.’ 

‘O- _kay?_ ’ asked Crowder, drawing the word out in disbelief. 

‘Follow our car. If you want to tell us more, you can over dinner. If not, I have some locking up to do.’ 

Crowder recognised the dismissal and turned to go, Will moving to follow. But once Crowder was out the door and out of earshot he paused, looked back at his wife. ‘Sarah…are you sure? I like him but maybe he’s right about being careful.’  

She put her hands on her hips. ’You brought him here, dear, knowing I wouldn’t be able to say no. Why not feed him as well?’

‘At our house?’

Sarah shrugged. ‘Even murderers have got to eat.’

 

* * *

 

Boyd sent a silent prayer up to his Lord in heaven before getting out of the truck and approaching the Jacksons’ modest house. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been to an honest-to-God sit down dinner — Ava’s dinner table, the hard chemical-blood smell of her floor, his punctured chest the only thoughts coming unbidden to mind — and his acute awareness of the approaching dinner fellowship weighed heavily on him. He had nothing, not even a bottle of wine, to offer them.

The house was out on the Oakridge-Westfir road, and nearly buried in trees: the yard spread out and stopped, cut off on all sides by the surrounding woods. Moths danced around the light spilling from the open door as Boyd mounted the porch. They fluttered pale and ghostlike above his dark head as he stopped at the threshold. Looked at the wooden doorframe. Something was nailed just above eye level to his right, rustic and matching with the frame but there nonetheless and the sight of it twisted his gut. A mezuzah. The Hebrew letters sitting there judging.

‘Merciful heavens forgive me,’ he murmured. Brand on his shoulder a grave offence. The best he could do was to sit down on the stoop with his head in his hands. 

‘Hey man, you get lost between the yard and the door?’ Will said, a tall figure backlit in the doorway with a dog at his heels. ‘Food’s ready.’ His shadow fell over Boyd, who felt the man’s presence at his side and did not look up. ‘What are you doing?’ 

‘Prayin’ for forgiveness,’ said Boyd, muffled by his hands. The dog snuffled at Boyd’s ear, found him uninteresting and trotted past him into the garden. 

‘What for?’ 

‘I am not worthy to enter under your roof.’

Will made a noise that might have meant that he thought Boyd was nuts, and hollered into the house: ‘Sarah! Boyd’s refusing to come in cause he’s not worthy!’  

‘Oh?’ yelled Sarah, sounding like she was holding several hot things at once. ‘The stew’s on the table! He want me to bring it out to him?’

‘You want the stew out here?’ asked Will like Boyd hadn’t heard.  

‘What do you think the rest of it said?’ said Boyd, flinging his mangled hand up to show the finger tattoos now spelling _I-N,_ first two letters gone. In prison, he had been known — for the things he had done, but known. Here the unknowing unnerved him and he could not bring himself to pass as a worthy man among these worthy people. 

Sarah emerged on the porch holding a tray. ‘Will, could you get the chair cushions?’ She put down the tray while her husband quit staring at Boyd and entered the house, remerged with some fraying cushions for the porch furniture. 

‘Thanks babe,’ she said, handing him a bowl of stew. ‘Lucky it’s a nice night out, we should eat out here more often.’ She took a bowl and sat, the two of them sitting and watching Boyd. ‘If you want stew it’s right here. It’s pretty good if I say so myself.’

Husband and wife slurped loudly at their bowls, making Boyd remember just how hungry he was. Twelve years in prison had conditioned his stomach to start growling bang on the dot of five, and it was well past that now. The smell wafted over, fragrant with meat and herbs. At the porch steps black dog sat watching their movements with sharp interest, poised to snap up any stray food.  Boyd sat quietly until the words ran out in his head, then asked, ‘You Jewish?’

Sarah lowered her bowl. ‘I am.’ Like she was daring him to say more. 

‘You going to ask if I’m black?’ Will asked, chewing appreciatively. 

Boyd looked out into the scrubby yard and the road beyond. ‘I feel obliged to tell you that I have both said and done some awful things in my time. Against your people. To which I can only apologise for the hatred I inspired and the dangerous disregard of my actions. I have repented of them before God, but not before man.’  

‘Do you want me to tell you that you’re evil?’ said Sarah, eyebrows drawn down. ‘Kick you out of my house? That make you feel better?’ 

‘It’s not about my feeling better,’ Boyd said softly. 

‘It would help lighten the mood,’ said Will. ‘If your next confession is that you’re a vegetarian, well, that’s beyond forgiveness. Waste of good stew.’ He thrust the bowl into Boyd’s good hand, spoon into the other, commanding: ‘Eat.’

Boyd ate.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now it may just be my love for quiet and restrained season 2 Boyd, but Boyd's characterisation in this fic really hinges on Walton Goggins' (and my own) belief that his change at the series' end was sobering and permanent, and most importantly, real. Which may have involved some reflection. Comments, as always, are very welcome!


	4. Chapter 4

> _ I ask'd _
> 
> _ This question of my father; and he said, _
> 
> _ Because this evil only was the path  _
> 
> _ To good. Strange good, that must arise from out _
> 
> _ Its deadly opposite! _
> 
> ** Lord Byron, Cain **

 

* * *

 

As the crow flies the path from Oakridge to Cottage Grove is a straight one west, but devoid as he was of wings it took Boyd an hour to get from one town to the other. It was dark when he left and dark when he arrived, and yet when he parked there was a solitary kid riding in circles outside the supermarket on an overlarge bike. The evening at the Jacksons’ had come to an amicable end; he felt filled, with food and company that he had not experienced for years. It left him comfortable and reticent to travel far but he got in his truck and drove anyway; he wanted to be there bright and early for that harvesting job in the morning. The vineyard in Saginaw lay a short drive away.

He stretched and yawned. Approached the well-lit supermarket, but when he tried to enter the sliding doors stayed resolutely shut. He glowered at the sign pronouncing the store's closing time: _23.00._ It was five minutes past. 

‘You have to wait for someone to come out,’ called the kid as he was about to leave. The kid was a kid but he sat straddling his bike and watching Boyd like some world-weary cowboy, au fait with the workings of the world and local supermarkets. 

‘What?’

The kid scrunched up his face. ‘You have to wait for someone to leave, then you sneak in when the door opens,’ he explained like Boyd was a world-class idiot.  

‘All right,’ said Boyd. ‘Obliged.’ The kid resumed his slow circling, looping a path only he knew to follow. Boyd tramped his feet and waited hands stuck into his armpits for warmth. A few minutes later the door hissed open to let out a woman laden down with bags, and he slipped into the store feeling the kid’s eyes on him.  

When he came out the kid was still there. ‘You manage okay?’ the boy called, sitting up from where he had been slumped over the handlebars. 

‘Thanks for the tip,’ Boyd replied, dumping his purchases in the bed of his truck and cracking open a four-pack of Reese’s Pieces. He tossed one to the kid, who snatched it out of the air deftly. 

‘You some kind of pervert?’ asked the kid, examining the chocolate. He tore the wrapper open and popped a piece into his mouth.

‘No sir,’ said Boyd. ‘I ain’t of that predilection, just aiming to reward an honest citizen for his assistance. If that’s all right with you. Your mama know you’re out this late?’ 

The kid hitched his jeans up around his skinny hips.‘Let me worry about my mama, mister.’

‘As you wish.’ The boy pretended to resume his cycling while shooting covert glances at Boyd, who had climbed into the truck bed and was arranging his things around him. Finally the kid’s curiosity got the better of him. He came closer and peered up at Boyd, asking: ‘You’re planning on staying the night like that?’ 

Boyd straightened from where he was hunkered stuffing his bag to make a pillow, and looked up at the clear night sky.‘A poet once said, _The secret to the making of the best persons, is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth._ Opportunity to sleep under the stars has been denied me for quite some time.’

The kid looked sceptical. ‘You’re kinda weird, mister,’ he said, not without respect. He crumpled up the sweet wrapper and stuffed it into his pocket, took out a phone and checked the screen. ‘Best be off home before I get talking to anymore strange men in parking lots. 

Boyd nodded. ‘Sounds like judicious reasoning. You gonna get home safe?’

The kid flicked on his bicycle light. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He wobbled on the pedals, setting off. Boyd lay down on his back, pulled his blanket up around him. It was quiet now but the boy could still be out there watching. Even if it was late. He closed his eyes and breathed in the air and considered drifting off to sleep until he heard the kid’s voice pipe up from a distance.

‘Hey mister!’

‘Pardon me?’ Boyd called out languidly. 

The kid sounded embarrassed, urgent. ‘Who was the poet who said the stuff about the air and shit?’

Boyd chuckled, surprised. ‘Man by the name of Walt Whitman.’ 

A pause. ‘Huh, okay. Thanks.’ Then the squeaking of tires. Boyd stuck his hand above the rim of the truck and waved, maybe the kid saw him, maybe he didn’t. The silence settled again and the distant pinhole lights of the Big Dipper winked down on him as he lay there, a free man under the open sky, and slept. 

 

* * *

 

The next morning saw the sun shining palely through a high haze, casting a weak greyish light on Boyd and the other men standing in the at the foot of the sloping vineyard. They were listening to the owner explaining the upcoming day’s work with a vigour that did not move his labourers’ tired and wan faces. There were six of them in total: three men that murmured occasionally to each other in deft Spanish, a quiet gangling student, and the man named Harry Davis who had driven them over from Oakridge. And Boyd.  

Arturo, the owner, was a genial man with his shirt rolled up over hairy arms that swept expansively as he told them how to discern good grapes from bad, how to handle the fruit, to be delicate with the grapes’ thin skins. Boyd listened and learned and said nothing, and set out with the others. 

He liked the work. It was menial and tough, but he didn’t mind it. The hours passed and the fog lifted, giving a golden cast to the rocky hill and the full, dark bunches that weighed heavily on the vines. Sweat stuck to his shirt. He clipped and bent to gently lower the clusters of grapes and clipped and bent again until it was time for lunch. The men sat on their haunches in the yard and chewed slowly on sandwiches wrapped in brown paper. Boyd leaned against his truck, eyes closed and face upturned to the sun. He could hear the rapport of the Hispanic men as they spoke good-naturedly with Arturo but they were too fast for him to fully understand, even after six years of Spanish classes courtesy of the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex’s educational programming. 

‘You didn’t get murdered,’ said a voice. Boyd opened his eyes and saw the kid from the night before standing in the yard, wearing a different baggy t-shirt and his brown hair pushed up from his forehead and a skeptical expression. Two lanky wire-haired dogs flowed around his legs, nipping and barking at each other. ‘My mama makes it seem like sleeping in a parking lot’s an invitation to get murdered.’ 

Boyd rubbed his jaw. ‘No one’s murdered me yet. You followin’ me by any chance?’

‘I was going to ask you that. Sure you’re not a pervert?’ The kid grinned. ‘Arturo’d sic the dogs on any perverts roaming around.’ He leant down to rub the nearest dog roughly around the ears. ‘Isn’t that right?’ The dog whined and rolled over to bare its belly, tail whapping the ground with chopper-like frequency.  

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Boyd, crouching down and extending his hand to the other dog. It approached warily, sniffed wetly at his fingers. Surrendered its head for Boyd to scratch. The kid stopped rubbing the tan dog’s belly and looked at Boyd under his dishevelled fringe, throwing the question out casually, like he wasn’t wild curious. ‘How did you lose your fingers?’ 

‘The word _lose_ implies some degree of carelessness on my behalf,’ said Boyd lightly, still rubbing the dog from ears to snout with his bad hand. ‘I didn’t misplace them; as I recall they were taken from me. Unwillingly. But that was some time ago.’ 

The kid gaped at him. ‘Holy shit.’ The momentarily neglected dog put its front paws on the boy’s chest, knocked him to the ground and proceeded to lick his neck and face with zest. Boyd laughed. 

‘¡Ay, muchacho!’ They looked up to see Arturo frowning down at the identically dust-covered dog and boy with his hand over his eyes, radiating exasperation. ‘You have to make him respect you, otherwise he will knock you down every chance he gets. Also, what will your mamí think; she says to me ‘Arturo, let my son help you with your website’ and I say 'por supesto, señora' because she knows I am not good with the computers and that I will keep you out of trouble, and then I send you back covered in dirt? Not good.’ 

‘Es mi culpa _,_ ’ said Boyd, pulling the kid to his feet. ‘Lo siento.’ 

‘You push the boy over?’ asked Arturo, mock glowering with his hand on the kid’s shoulder.  

‘I got distracted and Gaucho tackled me,’ said the kid, grinning up at Arturo. ‘An honest accident. Look!’ He brushed the worst of the dirt from his jeans. ‘It’s fine!’ 

‘Your mother is a saint,’ groaned Arturo. ‘This boy, he goes out and stays out all day well into the night, and so his mother sends me out to look for him. He comes back with things; fruit, junk, bruises; he says nothing. Or worse, he lies.’

‘I do not!’ protested the kid. Boyd wondered if the man was the kid’s father or stepfather; they seemed comfortable in each other’s company and Arturo’s dogs acted like the boy was family. Looking between the two, he figured the boy wasn’t dark enough to be the Arturo’s blood relation. But then again, who knew?

‘Another lie!’ said Arturo, eyes dancing with laughter under his lowered brows until he could hold it no longer. He slapped the boy on the back, grinned. ‘Ah escuchame señor, he’s a good boy really.’ 

‘My daddy’d whup me and and my brother if we got in past curfew, so as to instil a greater sense of punctuality,’ said Boyd. ‘Not that that stopped us none. In fact, my brother would turn up later and later just to get a good look at his sidearm technique.’

Arturo laughed, running his hand through his beard. ‘His mother has a big heart,’ he said in way of explanation. ‘And she trusts me to put him to work, yet instead the boy runs wild and rolls in the dirt with animals. Makes me miss Frída,’ he said, explaining, ‘our old dog. She was above such things.’ He checked the patent watch on his tanned wrist. ‘Listen, chacho, it’s time for us all to get back to work — including you.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said the kid, rolling his eyes. Arturo ruffled the boy’s already-messy hair before heading back to the other men, who stood, brushing dust from their jeans and stretching ready to resume work. The kid rubbed his face and squinted up at Boyd. ‘I looked up that poet you were talking about.’

‘Oh?’ 

‘First I thought it was the same guy that wrote about the daffodils, you know that poem?’

Boyd nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Same initials, different fellow.’

‘But this dude, I couldn’t understand most of what he’s trying to say, he writes like he’s Shakespeare or something. Takes ages to figure out what he’s on about.’

‘Sometimes the best time spent is on that which is not immediately knowable,’ said Boyd.

‘That another line from some old dude?' 

‘Not unless you aim on countin’ me among the fossils.’

The kid grinned, spinning around to walk backwards as he reviewed Boyd. ‘I’m going to leave before I have to answer that,’ he said, clearly looking at the man before him and seeing a battered, greying old redneck but being too diplomatic to say so. ‘I’ve got work to do. I’ll see you around, I guess.’ 

Boyd watched the boy sprint away with the two dogs in tow, slowly joined the other men. They harvested three tonnes of Pinot Noir that day and another two the next, and by the end of it Boyd’s back and hands were aching, his face and forearms darkened. He didn’t see the kid around on the second day; the new copy of _Leaves of Grass_ stayed untouched on his passenger seat. Instead, he took his book and his money and drove back to Oakridge with the evening sun filling his rearview mirror, too tired to consider the next morning’s work at the bakery and the kindness he would have to endure.  

And he didn’t think of the boy again for some time.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for my unused Spanish, if there are any errors let me know. Comments appreciated, welcome, lauded etc etc!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New friends also mean new enemies. Comments welcome and appreciated!

 

> _ “They's a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there." _
> 
> _Arvin asks, "More than a hundred?"_
> 
> _Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. "Yeah, at least that many.”_
> 
>    
>  **Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time**

 

* * *

 

‘Now that,’ said Sarah Johnson, scraping the knife in her hand on her apron, ‘is a poppy seed cake my mother would be proud of. What do you think, Eli?’

Boyd wiped his forehead with his wrist. It was hot in the small kitchen, the three of them crowded around the oven and a perfectly circular, cooling bundt cake. Beside him, Eli shrugged, which was as approving a gesture Boyd was likely to get. The boy was the bakery’s longest running employee: a frown and earring-wearing high schooler that had first made Sarah’s acquaintanceship when he smashed her shop’s windows in two years previous. Instead of pressing charges she had offered him a job, and so Eli Lamberton had gone from angry vandal to less-angry apprentice pastry chef with the best paying job out of all his classmates. It seemed that Sarah had a type. 

‘Let’s allow it to cool off before Eli does the icing,’ Sarah said. ‘Not bad at all. That’s another one to add to your list of competency, Boyd.’She slid the cake onto a wire rack. ‘Although Eli’s still my main man in the decorating department.’

‘I’d eat anything so long ’s it tastes good,’ said Boyd. ‘But your customers got a more discerning sense of the aesthetic. Eli could put icin’ on a raw potato and folks would buy them by the ton.’ 

In the three months since Sarah had decided to keep Boyd on as a full time employee she had passed on a great deal of knowledge about the art of baking, along with the secrets to a coffee machine that required as about as much training as all the aerospace technology at NASA. When Boyd looked at himself as a stranger, as a man in his fifties learning to bake and be content in a small sphere of life in rural Oregon, he could barely imagine anything further from the path set for him in back home in Harlan — the one that ended with a bullet finding his heart. Yet here he was. New beginnings, poppy seed cake.  

Boyd backed out of the kitchen with a tray of fresh rolls, loaded them up in the bread baskets on the counter. ‘You wantin’ the usual, Mrs. Coleridge?’ he called to the old lady that frequented the window seat with a book of crosswords near on every morning. 

‘Please and thank you Boyd. And one of those buttermilk biscuits as accompaniment.’ 

‘Comin' right up.’ It was regulars like Mrs. Coleridge that usually turned up this early in the morning: old folks with busted sleeping patterns, truckers setting out for the long-haul, high schoolers getting their mandatory fix of caffeine to help them through first period all encountered the fresh waft of the day’s first batch as they came in the door. It was by far the best smelling place Boyd had ever worked — not that the mine or Johnny’s were much competition, fragrance-wise.

At around twelve, the door chimed as Bernadette came in to take over the lunch rush. ‘You’ve got flour in your hair,’ she pointed out, cinching her apron around her wide hips as Boyd shucked his. 

Boyd said, ‘Is that a polite way to point out the abundant grey that’s a-growin’?’ 

She waved her hands, unable to abandon her role as an exasperated mother even while her four children were at school. ‘Well you’re not dusted with dignified old age, but by all means ignore me. Go around looking like that.’  

With the few hours of his break Boyd typically went back to his peeling hole of an apartment and slept for a while, listened to one of his second-hand CDs all the way through, or read. All in all it was a bit like free time in prison but he didn’t mind. It helped get his head in order after the long morning; returning to the shop afterwards felt like the beginning of a whole new day’s work, the feeling compounded by Eli coming in with his bag and a glazed expression similar to the one he wore before school. That was how the days usually went. 

This day was punctured by difference. Around four, a young man with a battered army jacket and thick chain hanging from his back pocket came in and looked around belligerently with his head craned forward like a bloodhound. Boyd put his hands on the counter, surveyed the new customer. If this had been the bar he would have had his hand on the shotgun under the till by now, but instead he said, 'You look like a man with a mission, friend.’ 

‘Is Eli here? Eli! You there?’ said the man. The greasy hair swinging in hanks across his forehead and the agitated cast of his eye struck Boyd as being reminiscent of the inmate population of Kentucky state prison. Give the man a jumpsuit and he’d fit right in.

‘Let me check,’ Boyd said, knowing full well that Eli was in the back prepping mix. He nearly knocked the boy down as he entered the kitchen; Eli leapt back from his listening place at the door, pale and hard-faced. 

‘Eli, some scudder callin himself your kin’s out there makin' a racket. Any chance you want to talk to him?’ 

‘Jared,’ said Eli, and for a moment his eyes radiated something akin to the resigned, tightly controlled hidden fear of a young Raylan Givens. Boyd blinked. ‘Something must have happened for him to get so pissed. He usually leaves me be. Shit.’

‘I’ll try to talk him down,’ Boyd said as a long dead memory bobbed to the surface of his mind: a red-faced boy stalking away from the Givens’ house, Boyd sitting there waiting for his daddy to finish up his business and trying not to look too hard at his classmate’s darkening bruises. Huh. He hadn’t thought of Raylan like that in some time — just as Raylan the lawman wanted, no doubt. 

Boyd headed back into the shop, taking small pleasure that at least Eli’s hard-man brother had not tried to muscle behind the counter while he was gone. Boyd said pleasantly, ‘He’s in the middle of somethin’. Do you want to leave him a message?’

Jared’s scowled. ’You fucking deaf as well as crippled? I want my brother out here now. Eli, come on! _Eli!_ ’

The two old men Mr. McCallister and Mr. Ainsworth looked up from their corner chess match to watch the exchange. Mr. Ainsworth frowned at the disturbance, coughing pointedly. ‘Jared, I reiterate: your brother is currently at work,' said Boyd. 'He ain’t being paid by this establishment to have cosy family sit-downs whenever you feel like it. And I’d ask you to lower your voice. Ain’t a football stadium in here. He can hear you jus’ fine’

‘What is your problem, man? I just want to talk to my brother. Now step back otherwise I’ll be taking this personally.’ 

‘Eli is a professional young man, if he don’t want to stop his hard work to confer with you I would be hard pressed to make him.’

‘ _I’ll_ fucking make him. Get out of my way.’ 

Boyd raised his palms to his chest but stayed where he was. ‘How ‘bout we step outside for a sec, you let loose some of that anger, get in a couple’a shots at me. Then we step inside all civilised-like and you try a slice of cake on the house while we wait for your brother. Does that sound to your satisfaction?' 

The man’s sweaty face was inches from Boyd’s, every quivering facial hair on display. ’Yeah that sounds to my _sat-is-faction_ , you redneck cocksucker. Let’s head out and see if you can even make a fist with that gimp hand ‘fore I pound you into street pizza.’  

‘All right. After you,’ conceded Boyd, untying his apron and holding the door for his opponent. They stepped into the street, Jared swinging his arms, loosening up, hawking up a gob of phlegm and planting it at Boyd’s feet. Inside the bakery, the old men peered out from their new seats by the window as the two squared off. Boyd stood with his arms crossed and waited.

The first punch caught him square in the face. Boyd staggered back, taking it full on without complaint, felt the blood begin to run from his nose and lip as he straightened to take the next hit. Jared was shaking his fist, frowning not from hurt but from puzzlement. ‘Come on, man,’ he called. ‘Don’t just stand there like a pussy.’ 

Boyd let the blood drip down his face without making a move. Waiting. 

Jared grimaced, cracked Boyd another one right on the cheekbone. Boyd didn’t budge. ‘Shit, man,’ said Jared. ‘Fight back! This is no fun otherwise.’  

Boyd put his fingers to his face, looked at the blood coating his fingertips. ‘Is that enough for you?’ he asked. ‘I said a couple’a shots: you’ve had a couple’a shots. Anything else is extra. Now, do me the courtesy of allowin’ me to get you something to eat.’

Eli’s brother looked uncertain, not sure if Boyd was taking the piss somehow, pacing back and forth like he was ready to take another swing. ‘You’re unnatural, just standing there. Fuck, I just wanted to talk to my brother.’ 

‘And you can,’ said Boyd. ‘Come inside and set a while like a man of your word.’ The moment stretched out, tense, until Jared finally broke. 

‘Yeah, okay. I guess I agreed to that.’ 

They went back inside, the old men resuming conversation like they hadn’t paid any attention even as the chess board sat abandoned at their original table. Mr. McCallister called, ‘You want me to call the police, Boyd?’ 

‘Nah, that’s not necessary,’ said Boyd. ‘Mr. Lamberton and I are gonna have a sit-down chat, all well and good.’

‘You’ve got something on your face,’ croaked Mr. Ainsworth and Boyd grinned, teeth shining white and ghoulish among the drying blood. He retied his apron and carefully set out a slice of red velvet on a plate, placed it before Jared and sat down. 

‘There you go, best kind there is. Made by your brother as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘Eli? You want to come out here for a bit?’ The kitchen door opened and Eli poked his head out, blanching as he saw Boyd’s face. He stood at Boyd’s shoulder and stared at his brother.

‘Jesus, Jared. What the hell do you think you’re doing, coming here and beating up my fucking co-workers?’  

Jared put down his fork. ‘Eli, sit down.’ 

‘No, not until you give me a good reason for this shit.’ Eli’s fists bunching at his sides.

The brothers glared at each other while Boyd sat and tongued at the blood on his mouth. He’d be damned if he wasn’t going to have a split lip and a black eye. Not a good look with his parole officer. ‘This is good,’ said Jared, meaning the cake. Eli didn’t soften. ‘Look bro, I wanted to talk to you about some of your friends from school. They, uh, jumped me and Don. Stole some stuff. Wanted you to see if you could get them to return it.’ 

The kid trembled with apoplectic rage at Boyd’s shoulder. 'For the last time, those aren’t my friends. If some teenagers manage to steal your stupid dope supply, well, you kind of deserve it. I’ve got nothing to do with that shit, so please, get the hell out.’ Jared hesitated, sensing the shifting dynamic. Eli stiffened and growled, ‘Get out. Now. And don’t ever come here to see me again.’

Jared shrugged. Left. As the door swung shut the old men heckled, ‘Good riddance!’ and cheered ‘Good for you, boy!’ to Eli. Boyd stood and addressed the remaining customers, ‘We’re very sorry about the disturbance.’

Mr. Ainsworth said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s the most excitement we’ve ever had in this joint. Although son, you might want to get that face checked out,’ his lined face glowing with the kind of vitality brought on by vicarious living. 

Eli was shaking. ‘I swear I’m going to kill him,’ he said over and over. 

‘I’d advise if you didn’t take that line of action,’ said Boyd, finally applying wet napkins to the blood coagulating on his upper lip and nose. ‘I can tell you, prison ain’t a whole lotta fun, what with it being full of gentlemen like your brother.’ 

It was at this moment that Sarah walked in, took one look at Boyd and put down her bag, necessitating an explanation of the events leading up to Boyd’s bloodied face with lurid embellishments courtesy of the old men. When they were finished she sat back and took a long hard look at her employees. ‘Well, damn. The one time in the day I leave you alone?’ she said, impressed. ‘My God, I should have opened a bookshop or something instead - is it me or do bakeries attract this sort of thing? I’d say you two handled it pretty well. Although I don’t think I would advise getting the shit beaten out of you as an official strategy in every conflict situation.’  

‘Was only two hits,’ Boyd pointed out.

‘Two hits too many. I want you both to take the rest of the evening off. No arguing.’ They knew better than that, and so they ended up standing in the street outside the bakery a good half hour early with nowhere to go. It was only then that Eli started to cry. 

 

* * *

 

 His wallet lighter from the price of three milkshakes, Boyd dropped Eli off outside his house figuring the boy was in no state to walk anywhere. They had spent the evening in a diner where Eli cried a bit more and then managed to stifle his unexpected outbreak with the help of an extra-large chocolate shake. ‘He had no right,’ Eli kept muttering, ‘He had no right to do that.’ 

Boyd didn’t say a whole lot, just plied the kid with milkshakes until his distress turned to embarrassment. Eli’s ears had slowly flamed red as he realised that he had burst into tears in front of his ex-con coworker, so much so that his piercings stood out like showpieces and his reddened eyes looked normal in comparison. He squirmed, fidgeted with the tacky menu. Boyd examined the miniature wall-mounted jukebox. The whole experience had been the expected level of awkward. 

There was a flatbed Chevy parked at the street corner outside Boyd’s two-room apartment and as he parked two men got out, stood at the pavement and waited for Boyd to face them. One of them was Jared. The other was a big bruiser with a shaved head proudly displaying a double lightening bolt tattoo and a gothic _88_ on his forehead. Of course. 

The two of them squared up to Boyd like a couple of fighting cockerels. ‘Jared explained to me the situation earlier, and I told him I think he got played,’ said the big one, looking like to break Boyd’s neck. ‘You some kind of smart-ass, thinking you can interrupt family business and psych my man out with some whacky pacifist bullshit? Only reason he didn’t end you then and there was he didn’t want to.’ 

‘Whatever you say,’ Boyd said levelly. ‘Although I think Jared did what he did cause he knew it was the right thing to do. A man’s anger can be his ruin.’ 

‘Oh yeah?’ 

‘Don, let’s leave it,’ said Jared to his muscle, avoiding Boyd’s eye. ‘Some old faggot isn’t worth the trouble. And I already got him pretty good.’ 

‘Jared, you want that third hit? Because I only offered you two. Next one ain’t free,’ said Boyd. ‘And I confess I am losing patience with this whole affair.’

‘ _You’re_ losing patience? Well, let’s skip to the end already,’ Don said, swinging into motion. His thick fist headed straight for Boyd’s jaw — but this time Boyd moved, dodging out of the way and grabbing his attacker’s arm, twisting it upwards against his back. Jared halfheartedly made to help his friend but Boyd wrenched Don’s arm until the other man howled. He felt a darkness spreading in his chest; Eli’s tear-stained face swam in front of his vision mixing with some forgotten middle-school version of Raylan, the one that never ever cried, no matter what.  

Boyd bent over so that his lips brushed against Don’s right ear, one arm gripping the man’s neck and the other pinning his arm in a vice-like hold. ‘I may be tryin’ to live as a follower of Christ,’ he said. ‘But I cannot deny that I am, in my base nature, a man of violence. Do not test me.’  

The man wrenched and shuddered under his grasp but Boyd gripped his neck like a wolf worrying a sheep between its jaws. Afterwards, he reflected that some part of him may have torn the man’s arm out of its socket if left to his own devices, the old black feeling having reared so strongly with all sense of alarm buried beneath it. But like a sign from God Himself, a noise shattered the moment and jolted Boyd from his quivering rage: simultaneously annulling a future that may have involved severed limbs and increased prison sentences and bringing him back to himself. 

It was the phone in his pocket. 

‘Get,’ he said, releasing Don with a shove. The phone continued to ring. He groped in his jacket, fished it out, glared at the two men still standing staring at him like they expected him to grow fangs and bite. ‘What part of such brief instruction do you not understand? Leave. Now.’ He flipped the open.

It was like the resurgence of his old anger had been a warning, a green sky prefacing an oncoming tornado, drawing him back into his old life as easily as the phone call drew him back to his old home town. 'Yes,’ he heard himself saying, ‘I understand. I’ll be there.’ One call was all it took; after all he had given his word. Boyd Crowder was heading back to Harlan County.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

> _..he turned around and around, looking at the land which had become so familiar to him that he had got out of the habit of noticing it, and which now was suddenly strange to him, so strange that he could hardly believe that he had looked upon it before._
> 
> **John Williams, Butcher's Crossing**

 

* * *

 

 

There is nothing quite as unwelcoming as the business end of a shotgun, but after days of travel and countless roadsigns for Kentucky it was the twin barrels pointed at his face that made Boyd feel like he had truly come home. Clearly Harlan had not missed him.  

He stood with his hands up outside a darkened two-storey, squinting in the single porch lightbulb’s dangling glare. ‘Ma’am, I apologise for the lateness of the hour,’ he began. The woman kept the muzzle trained at his chest and glowered at him with the screen door propped open against her bare leg. She had hair to rival Carol Conlan of the Black Pike days, except Boyd (not that he would have said it to his old boss’s face) would have bet that Ms. Conlan’s red came from a bottle. The mishmash of freckles splattering the gunwoman’s cheeks and nose would suggest that hers was all natural, and it was worn in a messy tangle that Carol Conlan would not have been seen with even if dead in a ditch. 

‘What d’you want?’ she growled. It was the middle of the night; he was a fully dressed stranger while she wore boxers and a natty t-shirt and not much else, but she did have the gun to even things out. 

‘I was under the impression,’ said Boyd, ‘that this is the home of Loretta McCready. Disabuse me of the notion an’ I’ll be on my way.’

The gun did not waver. 

’S’alright, Jeanne,’ said Loretta as she emerged pale and dark in the hallway. ‘This here’s Boyd Crowder, what I was tellin’ you about.’ Jeanne aimed a moment longer before sliding on the safety and ejecting the round destined for Boyd from the shotgun’s chamber. Her face remained no less welcoming. 

‘Boyd,’ said Loretta. ‘Come on in.’ He followed her into the house with Jeanne flanking him a littleways behind. The place was old, lived in — much more modest than the richest woman in Eastern Kentucky could afford — but it was clearly a home. Knitted throws, cheap knick-knacks, a patterned table cloth, flowers. Loretta led to the kitchen, said over her shoulder, ‘Was only expectin’ you tomorrow. You drive all night?’

‘I did,’ said Boyd. He sat down. Dishes sat piled in the kitchen sink.

‘It’s too late to get into the particulars now, but I appreciate you comin’ as fast as you did. Some folk don’t remember how a debt operates anymore.’ She leant against the counter, arms folded, looking at his face. ‘Trouble find you out west?’ 

Boyd felt the healing bruise on his cheek. ‘Nothin’ I can’t take.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Jeanne, can you set up the sofa for Boyd? Best get some sleep ‘fore we get down to business.’ Boyd caught a look pass between the two women as Jeanne sloped off, and from it felt an odd intuition settle on him. 

‘When I asked you that time ‘bout havin’ someone you could trust,’ he said slowly, seeing himself treading a fine line, ‘That’s her, huh.’ The observation sat in the air, Loretta stretching it out and then saying, ‘You need anything from the kitchen you just help yourself. We don’t keep house.’ Not saying no. How about that. 

She retreated into the house and for the few hours while dawn reached down into the holler Boyd slept on the sofa, tried to keep lil’ Loretta McCready not-keeping-house with her red headed gunslinger out of his mind. When the sun began to lighten the room he got up and headed to the kitchen as if it was another day at Sarah’s — except one with a near empty pantry. To his surprise, old bread and even older eggs yielded a passable french toast and the stack on the table was growing high when he noticed Jeanne watching him from the doorway.  ‘Mornin’,’ said Boyd. It was still very early.

She sat and pulled some toast onto her plate, dipped a forkful into a veritable lake of syrup and ate. Finally she said: ’S’good. Smell woke me up.’ High praise from a laconic host.

‘Got a secret ingredient that makes anything palatable,’ Boyd said, holding up a bottle of Jim Beam scrounged from the kitchen cupboard. ‘Best way to break into the bourbon ‘fore ten in the A.M. Excuse me for taking the liberty.’

‘Loretta said to help yourself,’ said Jeanne. ‘Can’t reckon she’ll complain.’ They sat in silence, chewing on their toast while the house groaned and creaked around them. When Loretta appeared dressed and holding a stack of papers their plates were mopped clean; Jeanne burped and pushed a plateful towards her boss. ‘In all the stories I’ve heard ‘bout this man there ain’t nothin’ concernin’ his cooking. Makes food appear outta an empty fridge.’ 

The pile of papers drew Boyd’s eye as Loretta had her breakfast. Finally Loretta crossed her cutlery on her plate and addressed her guest, tone professional and every inch the lord of Harlan: ‘Boyd, you may be rightly wonderin’ as to why I went to such trouble to liberate you and have you sittin’ here right now.’

‘The thought has crossed my mind.’

‘Our business relates to old history, old but not buried. An’ since the other folks concerned are now dead, it jus’ leaves you to help me out — last man standin’ if you will.’

‘Ms. McCready, I do not consider myself an obtuse man, so correct me if I’m wrong in guessin’ that this is leadin’ to a certain nine million dollar question.’

‘Ah,’ Loretta said, a grim smile crossing her face. ‘There it is. The prospect of that much money just sittin’ on a mountain waitin’ to be found brings all kinds a’ folk pokin’ around. Now, understand that after everything went down I had the foresight to get the area set up with cameras, the motion capture kind, just to keep an eye out. The Department of Wildlife owes us substantially as we’re the main source of black bear sightings in the county — but that’s not all we get.’ 

She slid a grainy black and white photo across the table. ‘Few months ago this man came up the mountain awful interested in the abandoned mine at Joseph’s Valley. Had himself a whole lotta equipment, stayed there all day. Took a while to find him, but when we did we…persuaded him to share just what he was doing.’ Loretta spread out a sheaf of glossy prints. ‘This here is a 3D map of the mine shaft. Said he was only able to get his drone so far but he got paid anyway; someone hired him. And I find that very interestin’.’

‘I ‘magine you goin’ tell me it wasn’t the M.S.H.A. that done the hirin’?’

‘It was not. Unfortunately our man seems to have been dealin’ with a middleman so we’re none the wiser. But well, new interest in the mine just as it’s announced that the whole area is soon to be reclaimed?’ 

‘Doesn’t strike you as a coincidence.’

‘That’s right.’ She slipped a weathered scrap of paper from her files, held it up for him to see. ‘Boyd, you know what this is?’

‘Not that I am aware.' 

‘This,’ she said, ‘as far as I can attest was written in the hand of Zachariah Randolph. An associate of mine found it up the mountain. Police thought it was nothin’ when they was clearin’ out, but I did some of my own checkin’ an’ it’s bona fide. Here.’ She handed Boyd the page scrawled in a dead man’s hand. A few short figures in ink, blank paper. He waited. ‘I can’t think of much a man would need to write down while on the run, least of all in such a cryptic fashion. Makes me think he was tryin’ to conceal something important.’ She paused. ‘You knew Zachariah.’

‘As well as I could any man tried three times to kill me.’ 

‘He knew the mine. You know the mine. Plenty of places to hide things down there in the dark.’

Boyd felt a heavy weight settle in his stomach, taking in her words and the cipher in his hand. ‘In short, you’re telling me I’m goin’ back down the mine.’ 

‘You’re goin’ back down the mine.’

He leaned back in his chair, hands reaching to his temples. ‘Lord save us,’ he said softly. Poured himself a measure of Jim Beam and sank the shot, trying not to think of the doghole and the dark and how his luck in that place was stretched so thin it was sure to break one of these days. Soon. ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,’ he heard himself saying. ‘God _damn_ I need another drink’

 

* * *

 

_I used to live here,_ thought Boyd as he broke the lock of the house that he and Ava had once shared — the one in which he had nearly died. It was strange seeing the house in disrepair; paint peeling and grey, shingles chipped and the once neat windows boarded up. There had once been flowers there. Even in the darkness of her marriage to Bowman, Ava had always kept the place neat and homely and seeing the house as it was like Raylan looking through that scratched glass telling him she was gone all over again. His eyes stung.

The hallway was layered in dust and old yellowing letters. Boyd picked up a stack and crumpled one in his fist, tucked the few letters addressed to him into his jacket. Unaired and uncleaned, the house smelt old and strange and unlike Ava. What had he expected after twelve years? Time was not kind; his body felt a great tiredness welling up in him as he walked the rooms that Ava had once lived in, head swimming from the bourbon. 

This was the last place he should have come to in order to be alone with his thoughts, to contemplate the mine and the real possibility that the debt to Loretta would be paid with his life. There were too many memories here. _Ava cooking at the stove, flyaway hair escaping from her ponytail and the smell of fried chicken rising around her, sweat on her upper lip; Ava curled on the sofa with a blanket over her lap, paperback slipping from her hand as she slept with her mouth slightly open; Ava, lascivious, pinning him against the kitchen counter with her hands either side of his waist, a challenging look as she bent upwards to take a kiss from him and more; even Ava at the dining table, taut and dark-eyed, holding a gun aimed at his heart and ready as hell to pull the trigger._

Boyd lowered himself to the kitchen floor and felt the tell-tale prickling at the corner of his eyes, the tightness in his temples. Damn him, but he was going to sit and cry as if eight years to grieve for her were not enough. 

‘You can’t keep breakin’ in here,’ said a voice behind him preceded by a warning scuff of a boot. ‘How many times do I have to tell you tweakers that you’ll have to find somewhere else to do your dope?’ 

‘Bob Sweeney,’ said Boyd without turning around or getting up.

‘ _Constable_ Bob Sweeney,’ said the man behind him. ‘Get up now, you got to skedaddle. Before I have to make you —’ He walked around to look down at Boyd and the voice died in his throat, mouth gaping open in a comical reenactment of surprise. ‘Oh fuck me sideways with a cactus! Shit.’ 

Boyd raised his hands slowly. ‘You look good, Bob.’ 

Constable Bob Sweeney looked like a man occupying a space close to flabbergasted and bordering fearful. He was older, a little slower in movement, but age and frosted hair could not keep him from appearing childishly earnest. Kept opening his mouth and closing it, settled for curling his fist around his truncheon. ‘Look here, Boyd,’ he began but clearly couldn’t think of what to say next. 

‘I’m glad,’ Boyd said from the floor, ‘that you are in good health.’ 

‘Look here,’ said Bob again, trailing off lamely then recapturing his powers of speech. ‘What in the hell’re you doing here?’ 

‘As you may recall I used to live here. No doubt they informed you that I was getting released — they do tend to tell the victims when their attacker gets out.’

‘Victim!’ spluttered Bob. ‘Like hell.’ 

‘Bob, I shot you. I am sorry for the pain and dreadful convalescence I no doubt caused, well as a decrease in your quality of life.’ 

Bob’s eyes bulged. ‘Well, yeah. You know how much intestine they can take out of a man so he can still shit and eat? Same as they took outta me.’

‘My cousin Johnny complained of the same.’

‘You crying or what?’

‘Bob, I may not reach the end of this week alive so if you want to shoot me or beat me you best get to it now,’ said Boyd, looking up at the way Bob was gripping his truncheon and gun. Bob blinked. 

‘Hell, Boyd. This is friggin’ weird. I think I’m going to go,’ he said, shuffling his feet. ‘Doesn’t exactly feel like breaking and entering and so long as you don’t destroy anything…Ookay. Right.’ 

‘Thank you, Constable,’ said Boyd as the constable edged towards the door.

‘Uh, yeah. Don’t go shooting anymore folks, ok?’ 

‘I’ll try my hardest.' 

‘Right-o,’ said Bob, patting the jamb twice before making his hasty exit. Boyd heard the man’s wreck of a car start up outside with squeal of tires, leaving the house was empty and silent once more. The dust from his footfalls clouded the air, settled. Boyd tilted back his head, fighting the wild sudden urge to laugh at the unlikeliness of the whole thing: Bob Sweeney still alive and kicking and protecting old houses from squatters despite Boyd’s bullets, him expecting a junkie and finding a ghost instead.

‘Oh, Ava,’ Boyd said, and felt strange saying it. ‘I ought to have died here.’

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Bob Sweeney is alive and kicking! Thanks to those who have commented so far, I appreciate your support and kind words :)


	7. Chapter 7

 

> _In his notebook Treefrog writes, _ Back down under the earth where you belong. Back down under the earth where you belong. _ Each letter like a perfect mirror of the one that has gone before, his handwriting tiny and crisp and replicate. He could make a map of those words, beginning at the  B and ending at the g_  _— where all beginning begins and ends — and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies. _
> 
> ** Colum McCann, This Side of Brightness **

 

* * *

  

‘This is it,’ said Jeanne, folding the stained map in her hands. The ground before them was tangled with overgrown sedge and switchgrass, all but covering the dark hole in the ground before them so that it was barely noticeable. Boyd dropped his pack and knelt to clear the grate, pulling hanks of grass and weed from the lattice ironwork and leaving the deep shaft exposed. It yawned dark and ominous in the mountainous landscape. 

‘Pee-yew,’ breathed Boyd, three days back in Harlan not enough to prepare him for the long drop below. ‘Now, crafty and desperate as ol’ Zachariah may have been, him gettin’ down this hole encumbered with nine million seems to me somewhat of a stretch.’

Jeanne leaned over and spat. ‘We’ve done our research. Only entry point up past the main adit an’ barely marked as it is. Remarkable things done in desperation.’ She unpacked a circular saw from her kit, pulled a dust mask over her nose, and began to grind away at the bars covering the vertical shaft. Boyd stood back and watched the sparks fly in a fiery trail. He tugged at the tight underarms of his new blue overalls, ones never dirtied with the impenetrable smear of coal dust. Greenhorn overalls. That’s how he felt, going back down after so many years. _Shit._  

Jeanne cut through the last attached bars and together they hauled the grate onto the grass. Sat there panting. The hole beside looked a hell of a lot more threatening now that there was no safeguard to protect the unsuspecting from falling down the shaft. A strong oak stood not ten feet from them and with it Boyd used to secure a long length of rope, wrapping it round and tugging the final knot with all his weight. The rope didn’t yield.  ‘Well,’ said Boyd. ‘We’re ready to descend into the belly of the beast, misgivings notwithstanding.’ He unfolded a pair of thick protective glasses, put them on slowly. ‘Now, once we’re down there, you do as I say, understand?’ 

‘We been through this,’ said Jeanne as she jammed her hard hat down on her head.

‘I am aware. You answer to Loretta above ground, but make no mistake: below ground you do every thing I say.’  

‘I get it.’ 

Boyd clipped the rope to the harness strapped under his utility belt and approached the hole. ‘Lord, protect as we are lowered into this darkness as you protected your prophet Jeremiah. In your name we pray,’ he said aloud, then faced Jeanne. ‘I’ll go first an’ tug three times when I’m down.’

‘Age before beauty,’ muttered Jeanne, voice level, but her face was paler than usual under the rim of her hard-hat. 

Boyd positioned himself over the hole, put on his respirator and gripped the rope tightly with his gloved hands. There was a brief sickening moment as he stepped backwards, an inescapable lurch of fear before the rope took his weight. He steadied and began the descent, the day above him shrinking to a small circular spot above until a foothold appeared under his boot. He stepped down onto solid ground, unclipped the rope and tugged three times. 

With the light of his helmet illuminating the bottom of the shaft he could see the tunnel stretching out on both sides, the trusses and beams supporting the roof still mercifully intact. The monitor at his hip remained unresponsive so he cautiously removed the respirator and hung it from his belt. The first lungful of dust-laced air sent him coughing — but it was at least devoid of toxic gases.  By the time Jeanne’s feet appeared followed by the rest of her, Boyd had made a quick reconnaissance of the tunnel up ahead. ‘I’m thinkin’ this is the way to go,’ he said, wiping the sweat gathering on his brow with his sleeve. ‘This here is on a slope down to the seam, and if I put myself in the position of luggin’ a great big bag of money I think I’d choose downhill.’ 

Jeanne nodded, took in a few deep breaths. ‘You been below before?’ asked Boyd, seeing the way her eyes were darting around the dark passageway as if looking for an escape.

‘Naw,’ she said, cagey. ‘Just gettin’ used to it is all.’ 

‘Just stick by me,’ he said. ‘This doghole been abandoned thirty-odd years. Don’t want us separated by a cave in if it should come to that.’ They headed carefully down the tunnel; the rough-hewn walls were solid enough but the roof struts were warped with age. Behind Boyd Jeanne’s breath came heavy and loud.

‘Neck up ahead,’ he warned as they approached a narrow section of tunnel. Beyond was a low wide room, fully mined-out except for the pillars of coal left to support the sagging roof, a portion of which had already collapsed. Chunks of coal rubble piled to the ceiling. Boyd examined the debris, straightened, moved to a steel door standing in the rock face. ‘Seems to me we’re in the right place.’ 

Jeanne crumbled some coal in her fist. ‘How’d you reckon that?’

‘Pillar didn’t come down by itself,’ he said, gesturing to the half crumbled structure. ‘Been hacked into.’ He put a hand on the tarnished door. ‘And for a door permanently shut three decades ago, this mechanism ain’t in bad shape. Look where the rust’s been scraped off ‘round the lock.' 

‘So someone’s been down here.’

‘Someone has. Here’s hoping it was the old man come down the mine one last time.’

Jeanne knelt and tugged a chunk of rock from the pile. ‘Looks like pure coal,’ she said, holding up her blackened glove. ‘They just leave this stuff behind?’

‘You want to get into robbing out what’s left in this mine, that’s a whole other venture,’ said Boyd. ‘And one for which I don’t have any remainin’ interest. Last time I stripped a mine was 1990 or thereabouts, and I had a friend as thickheaded as I was to help. You don’t strike me as the stupid type.’ 

Jeanne squinted up at him. ‘Neither do you.’

‘Sometimes it takes two sharp people to be senseless together.’

Jeanne looked like she would have liked to defend the perceived slight against Loretta, but Boyd had his head cocked and face unreadable. ‘Turn your headlamp off,’ he said to Jeanne, steady but insistent. They both reached up and with simultaneous clicks the room plunged into inky darkness. ‘Don’t move.’For a moment the constricting silence settled on them like coal dust, dampening their breathing until — ahead, a distant clatter of rock: faint but distinctly audible.

‘Is there someone else down here?’ hissed Jeanne, her hand vice-like on his arm. ‘Oh, fuck me.’

‘Move behind the pillar to your right, slowly,’ whispered Boyd. ‘Let’s set and wait.’ He could hear Jeanne feeling for the pillar, and when she found it she pulled Boyd to the side. They hunkered down, listening for the approaching footsteps.  

Voices echoed up the tunnel.  Jeanne fingers bore into Boyd as the clatter and crunch of heavy boots came towards them, torch beams cutting through the dark. Crouching with his head down, Boyd blackened his face with coal dust to hide the sheen of pale skin in the dark. There were three lights, jolting up and down the tunnel walls in a sea-sick fashion: three men.  

‘Hey, hold up,’ came a scratchy voice, ‘There’s the door. This is it.’ The lights trained on the steel door, one panning over the collapsed coal. 

‘Aw fuck, we’re gon’ have to dig,’ said a second man, letting his bag fall to the ground with a heavy clunk. 

‘Then lucky we brought the gear,’ said another. ‘Quit actin like you lost your balls comin’ down here. You know how to use the jackhammer above ground.’ 

‘Yeah, I can jack all right,’ snickered the second. He unpacked his tools and soon the deafening tattoo of the jackhammer was filling the room, sending coal dust spewing up into the air. Jeanne held her hand over her mouth beside Boyd and he prayed she wouldn’t start coughing. 

‘Make sure you don’t hack through any of that money!’ yelled the biggest man as the whine of the jackhammer lulled momentarily. At the mention of the money Boyd stiffened imperceptibly: a cat sensing the scurry of mouse.

‘Don’t you worry none, I goin’ be real careful when that money surfaces. Like an archaeologist man, Indiana Jones I am.’  

‘Fuckin’ Indiana Jones destroyed everythin’ he touched, dickweed.’

‘Indiana Jones if he was a good archaeologist then,’ said the digger. ‘Ain’t my fault the good trade was misrepresented by his adventures. I know what I mean.’ 

‘Darl, I’m just askin’ you to be careful. You think you can do that and not choke us with all that damn dust?’

‘Now who needs to grow a pair?’ said Darl, and revved the jackhammer back to life. Distracted by the rock-splitting, Jeanne didn’t notice Boyd move from her side until he was gone. With one hand to the rough wall as a guide, Boyd followed the rock until his fingers until he found what he was looking for. He removed his overalls as deliberately as he could. As he was putting his boots and miner’s hat back on he felt a hand close around his ankle and just about stifled the urge to swear loudly when he saw Jeanne’s glaring face in the dark. 

‘ _What are you doin’?’_ she hissed over the head-clanging hammer.  

Boyd put a finger to his lips. The vent in the wall was ridged, and it took him a few moments to stuff the new overalls in all the way. They crouched together listening like foxes in a dog-flushed den, Jeanne trying to divine his meaning like a mountain witch even though there was nothing visible but the whites of his eyes to show her he was even there.  Eventually the drilling behind them stopped.  A shout split the air, hollow and reedy after the previous cacophony. ‘Curtis, look at that! You bet you goin’ to be pumpin’ Sarah-Jane and them other whores tonight man, cause we are loaded!’ 

‘Lemme see, man,’ said Curtis, with rising excitement. ‘Oh shit! How much you think that is?’

‘Boss said three million each stash.’ A rustling and a clattering, dragging, plastic and paper on rock. 

‘I can’t believe it,’ said the hoarse man. ‘You actually found it. Thought this was some old story or somethin’.

‘Some old story? Shit man, some of this already been found years back, boss told us weren’t no wild goose chase. You tellin’ me you dig round old caves for fun and you never found nothin’ worth anything?’ Darl was whooping like a dervish. The men’s distant headlamps were all pointed at one point on the ground, a shapeless mound before them. Three million unearthed just like that. 

Before Jeanne could stop him Boyd had stepped out into the light. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, looking with his blackened face and incongruous civilian clothes as though he had popped out of some darker reach of hell for a Sunday stroll. ‘I believe you are tresspassin’.’ One of the men yelled. 

Triple spotlights shone into Boyd’s face as the men stood gaping at the sudden apparition. ‘I think I pissed myself,’ moaned the shortest man. ‘My heart’s ‘bout to let out.’  

‘Who in the fuck’re you?’ called Curtis, fumbling with his belt and flipping open a switchblade. 

‘Could ask you the same question,’ said Boyd, teeth flashing white in the dark. ‘You boys diggin’ up all sorts of history here.’

‘I asked first,’ said Curtis, gripping the knife like he aimed to use it, ’If you ain’t some kind of undead thing I think you must be aimin’ that way, sneakin’ up on folks in the dark like that. Fact is I might have to teach you a lesson just cause Proctor gone and pissed himself.’ 

Boyd tilted his head and considered him seriously. ‘Would you believe me if I said that we’re conductin’ a site survey on behalf of the Mine Safety and Health Administration?’

‘No I would not, you spooky son of a bitch. You don’t exactly look official.’

‘How about if I said we come down here to fuck?’ asked Jeanne, coming silently up beside Boyd and glaring at the three men with flat-eyed venom. 

‘Oh man!’ crowed Darl, wiping the heavy sweat pooling on his lip. ‘That’s something, oh that is fucked up.’ Boyd shot Jeanne a questioning glance, murmured: ‘I’ll be tellin’ Loretta that was your idea, not mine.’ She shrugged. 

Curtis rubbed his beard, grimacing, unsure. But the man with the stained overalls said, ‘Nah that ain’t true, don’t you boys know that’s Loretta McCready’s gal? You don’t need to live round here to know that.’ The other two snapped to attention at the name. Darl grinned. ‘You don’t say? She know you fuckin’ around with the old man down here?’

‘Jesus, man,’ said Curtis, ‘she’s fucking with us. They's down here same as us, to get the money.’

Boyd’s teeth were very white in his blackened face as he bared a sharp salesman’s smile. ‘Now gentlemen,’ he said, ‘This don’t mean we got a quarrel with you. In fact I know there’s another three million sitting on the other side of that door: plenty to go around. Can’t see why we can’t come to a sensible agreement.’

‘How’s he know that?’ said Darl, looking to Curtis uncertainly. 

‘Why, how much of that money are you actually goin’ see from the man that has you riskin’ your lives down here?’ asked Boyd. 

‘You sure act like you know more than we do,’ said Curtis, still gripping the knife. Sweat dripped from his heavy brows onto his face. ‘But nobody livin’ that knows exactly where the money’s hidden.’ 

‘Well it seems to me,’ said Boyd pulling Zachariah’s paper from his jacket, slowly with the two fingers of his right hand, ‘that the man who put that money here ought to know. As far as I can tell shorthand refers to individual areas; three rooms, three places to look. You say some already been found? That’s one gone, along with this stash. Old man probably didn’t drag the last lot far.’ 

‘I think you’re full of shit. Probably got someone hidin’ behind that door to whack us.’

‘By all means go and look.’

‘Darl, keep an eye out. You hear anything, you stick ‘em both,’ said Curtis. He wrenched the wheel around and shoved the door open bodily with a metallic screech. ‘If you’re tellin’ the truth, maybe we can talk about gettin’ the money out together. 

‘I look forward to it,’ said Boyd softly, watching Curtis disappear into the dark mouth of the neighbouring tunnel. The two men fidgeted nervously, the air sweltering with heat and tension. His own mouth was as dry as bleached bone; as he watched the men's discomfort he felt the sweat gathered at his hairline beginning to run slowly towards the empty reservoir of his ear and south to his collar. 

‘Don’t see why we don’t kill you now,’ said Darl, spitting out a coal-tinged glob of phlegm. ‘We already got three million. Enough to go round.’

‘And what you think your boss’ll think of that?’ Jeanne said sardonically. ‘If you had a brain to do the math you’d figure if you get the rest an’ lie ‘bout findin’ it, you an’ the boss get three million apiece. Everyone’s a winner. Otherwise how long you think you’ll live if you rip him off?' 

‘Shit, woman, I think three million’d get us far enough.’

‘I think what the lady is tryin’ to say,’ said Boyd, ‘is that between your piss-stained spelunker, knife-wielding boss and your own good self, none of you’d have the grey matter to take possession of a shit if it was comin’ from your own ass-hole.’ 

Even in the gloom it was possible to see Darl’s face reddening. ‘Fuck you!’ he spat. After a prolonged struggle he fumbled a gun from his overalls, sweaty palmed, pointed the barrel at Boyd. ‘You say shit like that again and I will pop you in the head.’ 

‘Woah, ain’t no call for that,’ said Boyd, lifting his hands; placatory. ‘Although, I would strongly advise against using your weapon down here. I don’t want to be blown to kingdom come from ignorance on your part, what with the gases around being so vol-a-tile.’

‘You think you’re smarted than everyone else, huh?’ Darl tapped the silent monitor at his belt. ‘There ain’t any methane here, asshole,’ he said, and fired. 

The room exploded.

Before Darl had even pulled the trigger Boyd had already pushed Jeanne bodily into the tunnel beyond and was pulling the sealing door shut behind them as the fire bloomed from Darl’s unfortunate gun-hand with a concussive _whoosh_. The whole tunnel shook. Great cracks split the thick wall between them and explosion’s epicentre, sending coal dust showering down from the crumbling roof in heavy clods. The steel door buckled inwards like a tin can hit with a hammer.

A screaming and a terrible burning smell filled the air.  Boyd scrambled to Jeanne on his hands and knees. He pulled her away from the door as she coughed, screaming, ‘I can’t see! I can’t see nothin’!’

‘Hush now, calm down,’ croaked Boyd, but his hands were also shaking. To his horror when he took her by the shoulders to calm her she looked blankly into his face with wide and staring eyes that were totally black, even the whites. In a moment of dark surprise he thought her eyes were gone entirely. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, not sure if he believed it. ‘We got to move.’  She whimpered. 

‘What the fuck was that?’ said a voice. Boyd had almost forgotten about Curtis, inadvertently saved by the blast door alongside them, staggering from behind a pillar with fear and accusation. ‘What did you do?’ 

‘Get back,’ called Boyd. Curtis shone his cellphone torch at them, the light blinding in place of his shattered headlamp. 

‘What did you do?’ Curtis cried again.

‘You want to live you best get movin’ fast,’ said Boyd, pushing past him. ‘Post-haste, son.’

‘Proctor’s burning alive back there! 

‘Come on,’ said Boyd. ‘Place is coming down.’ He pulled Jeanne’s respirator onto her face before securing his own. Held out a hand to the man who stood stock still like a startled buck.

‘What about the fuckin’ money? You blow that up too? Killed us for nothin’!’

The ceiling cracked ominously above them. Boyd’s hand trembled. ‘Come on,’ he said, muffled. ‘The roof’s about to go.’ But in the end it was the floor that collapsed.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments greatly appreciated!


	8. Chapter 8

>  
> 
> _for earth to live again_
> 
> _earth that is all at once a grave_
> 
> _a resting place a bed of new beginnings_
> 
> _avalanche of splendor_
> 
> **bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)**

 

* * *

 

 

Boyd tasted blood in his mouth as he lay in the dark, feeling boneless and sore and disoriented. Hehad lost consciousness, that was for sure; one second he was standing upright holding his hand out, the next the angle was all wrong and he was on the ground — or under the ground — with a head full of ash. There was a faint trickling of water somewhere, a space beyond the blackness. His vision frittered and drained like a television on the fritz as he tried to sit up, but try as he might he couldn’t even raise his head. He was trapped. 

A slow-moving ooze of blood crept into his eye. Boyd lifted his hand and followed the sticky trail to its inception: a sharp rock the size of his hand had split his hard-hat as cleanly as a walnut shell and sat there, embedded axe-like, close enough to have left a gash in his hairline. Just inches from crushing his skull. Without shifting his position he reached up with both hands and tested the weight of the rock that was pinning him, found it tightly wedged and immovable. He carefully gripped the helmet and began to extricate himself. Blood ran thickly into his face as he deepened the cut, pulling himself out from the miner’s hat that had saved his life.

It took him a moment to realise that the surrounding dark was not impenetrable: there was a light faintly illuminating his surroundings, radiating from a pile of earth. Boyd leaned forward and dug with his gloved hands, pulling clods of coal and dust away until he saw the blinding white glare of a cracked phone screen. And holding the phone a hand. Exposed like a disturbed root to proffer Boyd light in the darkness, a dead man’s final gift. 

There was a splashing to his left. Taking the phone, he cast a wan light towards the source and saw a shape crouched. It was Jeanne, alive, rinsing her face with sump-water. She turned to the light, half-blind and bristling like a badger interrupted in its set, ready to fight. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘You ain’t dead.’

‘Unlike Curtis back there,’ said Boyd, crawling over to her. He winced; his jeans were ripped, the skin underneath bruised and torn and a stabbing pain was lancing his ribcage, but she looked worse than he did. Black tears leaked in tracks down here face, as the coal dust cleared from her eyes and mingled with the blood coating her chin.She had her overalls unbuttoned to the waist, revealing a nub of bone spearing from her collarbone. Unnatural poking through the skin. 

‘How the hell did you do that?’ said Jeanne, touching the bone and holding back a snarl of pain. ‘I know you got that fucker to blow sky high. What I don’t know is how you figured we wouldn’t get kilt along with ‘em.’ 

‘I didn’t,’ said Boyd. Took off his respirator; it was cracked anyway.

‘Well, fuck.’ 

‘He had the choice. I warned him against pullin’ that trigger.’ 

‘You raised him to it,’ she said flatly. ‘Don’t object to it, but I do object to takin’ us down with ‘em.’

Boyd coughed. ‘Weren’t my intent but it’s one of the hazards. Concentration of fine coal dust, raised temperature, a spark: all conducive to blowin’ shit up.’ He washed the blood from his face with the stream of water trailing the bottom of the mine. 

‘Don’t suppose any signal on that cell?’ She took the cracked smartphone from Boyd’s hand, swiped up, paused. Locked to the owner’s thumbprint. They both slowly turned to where Curtis had been crushed, his hand unearthed and inviting. 

With impassive brutality Jeanne picked up a sharp rock and hacked at the dead man’s thumb until it hung by a few severed ligaments. The sound was terrible. Boyd turned away as she tore ripped the thumb from its joints and stuffed it in her pocket, grunted, ‘Just in case we need it later.’ She wiped Curtis’ blood on her legs. ‘Think he’s got some goin’ spare. You want ‘em?’

‘Not particularly,’ said Boyd. He spat into the sump water that was running past his feet. As he watched, a bundle of hundred dollar bills shunted down the stream and into the dark bobbing swirl of the water beyond. It was so unexpected that he wondered if the gloom or the mine gases were playing tricks with his eyes until a school of loose bills floated past like so many minnows, churning and buoyant; he was on his knees in seconds, grabbed a sheaf in his hand. Benjamin Franklin, sodden and crumpled in his palm. 

‘Upstream,’ he said. Jeanne momentarily confused, then clambering up toward the pile of rocks from which the water was coming up. More bills spitting out from the stream into Boyd’s reach. Jeanne shifted rock with one hand, overalls swinging around her hips and soaked with water, lifting and digging until she pulled a plastic bag from the collapsed earth and coal. Plastic ripped and wet and leaking money, but still heavy enough for Jeanne to struggle even without her collarbone exiting her shoulder.

‘Well,’ she panted, as Boyd hurried to help her with the weight, ‘seems like something’s got our interests in mind.’ If this was a sign he knew not what of, but it was hard to deny that the odds of money falling like manna from heaven into their hands were very slim, if next to none.

Boyd dropped a single bill into the water and watched it flutter and swirl away as it followed the stream’s path into the unknown. Down and out. His mind went with it, testing out the route and their chances. ‘Divine providence notwithstandin’,’ he said, ‘we ain’t made it out alive yet.' 

Taking up the load of Markham’s lost sodden millions, Boyd began the climb into the water and the lengthening dark.

 

* * *

 

Three hours later, two figures crawled wet and filthy from the mouth of a forgotten adit. If there had been anyone to see it they would have surely thought the dead were rising from the mountain, as in the old hill stories — but as it was only a startled chipmunk fled the scene as Boyd and Jeanne emerged from the mouth of the mine, hauling the bag and Jeanne’s overalls tied and stuffed with money.

‘Never again,’ panted Jeanne, ‘Ain’t nothin’ in the world to get me down there again in this lifetime.’ 

As he sat there soaking wet with water and filth and blood, Boyd privately agreed that she was right. He was never going underground again until the time came for them to bury him dead in the earth, and then he figured it wouldn’t bother him much. For him, the mine was finally finished.

 

* * *

 

Despite the money, their return was markedly untriumhpant. From their appearance and lateness it was clear things had not gone to plan — Boyd left Jeanne to explain in Loretta’s care while he went to clean up. Their bathtub, after he was through with it, sat caked with a thick black ring staining the sides like a tideline. He scrubbed himself, shivering and naked, blackening the towels too as he dried himself. A cut set bleeding afresh and red doubled down his leg with the water onto the tiled white floor. He changed into his other set of clothes. Joined the women at the table, sat. The phone lay before Loretta, her pensive and waiting at the head of the table. 

The backwoods doctor had come and gone in the time Boyd took to feel human again; Jeanne’s shoulder was bandaged and she stood cagily over Loretta, eyeing the phone. She threw the thumb down on the table like a poker chip. ‘You’ll need that.’

Loretta looked at it for a moment, picked the severed thumb up and pressed it to the phone. ‘That was rather forward-thinkin’ of you,’ she said, mildly impressed. Scrolled down. ‘Looks like there ain’t any contacts but one. Unnamed.’ The speaker rang tinnily, twice, three times; they sat and waited. Then the line clicked on the other end. 

_‘Mister Friedburg, did I not make it clear that you are, and without exception, not to ring me before five o’clock?’_ came a nasal voice, carrying from who knew how far away. _‘You better have good news to tell me.’_

‘Excuse me sir?’ said Loretta, and her voice was different: officious and vapid. ‘We’re tryin’ to locate the next of kin of the owner of this phone. I’m afraid there’s been an accident. Did you know the deceased very well?’

There was a pause. _‘Our relationship was a business one. That’s very unfortunate to hear, Miss..?’_

‘Higgins. With the Kentucky State Police Department. Could you give me the deceased’s name and address?’

_‘I knew the man as Curtis Washburn, but like I said, we weren’t exactly bosom friends. Met him once, you know? Asked him to give me a call if he needed any work, but he never did, a real shame. Could I inquire as to the nature of his accident?’_

‘Looks like Washburn and a couple’a friends went explorin’ and set off a cave-in in an abandoned mine. Always a few each year. Well, thank you for your help Mister - ’ 

_‘Doyle. Eric Doyle.’_

‘You’ve been a real help Mr. Doyle. Save us pulling prints and dental to identify, and all that. Those boys were real messed up.’ 

_‘…A pleasure, Ms. Higgins.’_  

‘We’ll give you a call if there’s anything else,’ said Loretta, embodying a dumb hick cop barely a year in blue. ‘It’s too bad about Mr. Washburn. Bye now!’ She cut the call, expression hardening. They sat in the low light and as she leaned back the shadows planed her face. 

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Mister Doyle sure is a bald-faced liar.’

‘That he is,’ agreed Boyd, rubbing his damp hair with a hand. The notch in his ear strange to touch. It had been years since he had heard the man’s voice, but he’d be damned if it had been anyone else at the end of that telephone line and he felt himself laughing despite it all — the mutilated millions, the man on the phone that had swum away from the shipwreck of their partnership with Boyd’s stolen money like a particularly persistent and lucky blonde rat. He was almost impressed. 

‘Wynn Duffy,’ said Boyd. ‘Son of a bitch.’

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay (if there are those among you tracking updates), I'm just finishing up work so I'll hopefully have more time to write now! A certain character who's been taking his sweet time appears next chapter :) Comments appreciated.


	9. Chapter 9

 

> _The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not. _
> 
> ** Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian  **
> 
>  

* * *

 

They had tried to save the bakery, they really had. The place still had a lingering taste and stench of smoke hanging in the air, even five days later. Sarah Jackson covered her face as she stood in the charred wreck of the room and looked out on counter scorched with great bubbled pools of metal hardened and fixed like outcrops of blackened lava, at the streaks of smoke ash where flames had licked the walls. Tears prickled her eyes but she knew that it wasn’t the smoke to blame; they were tears of anger, coming unbidden as she surveyed how casually her livelihood had been destroyed by two thugs and a molotov cocktail. 

‘Bastards,’ she said aloud, and then wished she hadn’t. It didn’t make the shelled out bakery less ruined so she walked into the kitchen and heaved herself up onto a counter. At least the kitchen remained undamaged, flames having spread from the cafe area where the fire-starters had lobbed their hatred through the broken shopwindow. She sat there and the dark closed in. Her phone buzzed twice in her jacket, Will no doubt asking where she was even though he knew; she had come here every day for the last week to clean and strip out the burnt decor. 

But today she sat and that is where Boyd found her, fresh from Kentucky.  

Sarah looked up and saw him standing in the doorway like a revenant stray, dark and unreadable and watchful. He rubbed a hand on the lintel, came away ashen. ‘What happened?’ he finally said. 

‘You came back,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you would.’

'Sarah,’ he said, meting out his words like pebbles into a stream, ‘were you and Will harmed?’  

She shook her head. ‘We’ve had stuff before, vandalism, graffiti; dumb shit like that. But this was meant to hurt us. Fire started the night you left.’

Boyd moved toward her, something twisting the wide set of his mouth; pain maybe, truth. ‘Many things I may be, but I am not one to repay kindness with arson.’ 

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Will knows too. They’re on tape, the two shitheels that started it.’

‘I fear,’ he said, grimacing, ‘that I may have exacerbated the situation with the aforementioned shitheels. Eli’s brother and his friend.’ He held out his hand and helped her down from the counter, her feet as she landed sent dust motes spinning up and up. ‘Sarah, I’m sorry.’ They went into the burnt-out room and looked on the destruction side by side.

‘It’ll need remodelling,’ Sarah said. Unexpected laugh bursting from her chest, Boyd solemn at her shoulder. ‘I - just - those fuckers did a good job huh? Couldn’t have done it better if I was trying to burn it down myself.’ 

‘The kitchen’s still good.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We can have a whole Dresden dining experience.’ She was acting strange and she knew it, but from what she knew of Boyd he was unlikely to raise an eyebrow in judgement.

‘Thing about fire,’ said Boyd, ‘Leaves room for regrowth.’ She followed him through the broken window and from the street the place was a black hole in the surrounding shopfronts. Hardly promising. ‘Now, I happen to have come into some money recently, Sarah. You want a head-start gettin’ the place back into shape, I’ll help. Least I can do for bringin’ this destruction down on your heads.’ 

‘Do I want to know where this money came from, Boyd? You disappear for a week and come back looking like, well, worse than before — and offer me your money?’

‘It’s entirely reputable, God’s honest truth.’ It was hard to know whether or not to believe him, standing there with open arms, ready for her to tear him apart. 

‘I don’t want to take your money.’ He sighed, lifted his eyes skywards but she continued: ‘But if I do, we’re partners, okay? You help me out, we start the business together fifty-fifty.’  

He licked his lips. ‘That don’t strike me as bein’ wise. Anything with _Crowder_ on the front in big letters ain’t liable to last very long.’

‘Just on the paperwork then. How does a bakery-bookshop sound to you?’ Sarah held out her hand, knowing she had him hooked — the man with a book always on the go, sitting waiting for dough to rise or bread to bake perched on a stool turning pages totally absorbed, like to have the place on fire and not notice. A mercy they had lasted that long really. 

‘My previous business ventures did not end happily,’ he said, shaking his head as if to clear it.  

‘Fire starts things anew, didn’t you say?’ She grinned up at him. ‘If we’re not successful in a year, why you can burn the place down yourself and hotfoot it out of here.’ 

‘That’s a dangerous offer, Ms. Jackson. Man of my history might just take you seriously.’

‘I am serious.’ 

He paused. Her hand was still outstretched and he took it in his and shook. ‘Don’t think I’ve had a partner outside’a crime before. There you have it.’

‘I’m honoured.’  Something was swelling up in her, something like hope. Boyd reached into his jacket and took out a faded envelope, handed it to her with a wry expression. ‘All yours. You know, I did come into money this week, by not the most upstandin’ methods but this? I confess I forgot all about it. Worth quite a bit.’

Sarah opened the letter, read it over once, twice. Felt her eyebrows creeping higher and higher as she reread the document, the word _franchisee_ coming out in force. ‘How,’ she asked with rising incredulity, starting to grin, standing there in the street before her ruined business until the tears were running down her face as she shook with semi-hysterical laughter, ‘do you forget that you own an entire fucking Dairy Queen?’ 

 

* * *

 

The forgotten Dairy Queen paid for it all, and more. It appeared that the late Gerald Johns’ attorney had been less than meticulous when sorting out the man’s estate -- for upon finding the existence of a franchise owned by Johns in everything but the name on the paperwork, the attorney chose to contact the named owner's last known address -- and so the letter had sat on Ava’s mat for the past three years. If he was honest, Boyd had never expected the man to actually go about purchasing a Dairy Queen; he himself being too distracted by the shifting landscape of his operations to keep the man to his word. 

It was odd, making plans again. Boyd became used to evenings sat on the Jacksons’ porch, glasses of whiskey and a space heater warming the autumnal air as they discussed the future of the new bakery. Will sitting there with Bran the dog at his lap, listening and laughing as Sarah painted pictures of the hybrid store — ‘You gonna let people sit dripping pastry all over books they haven’t paid for? Good luck, babe!’ —and the place felt more real, something achievable. The reminder that he had been back down the mine was bored into his skin in purpling and blue bruises, but it still felt strange to imagine that he could go from the old terror and fight of Harlan back to this: a new plan, and one without breaking the law. 

Not that Oakridge was free from the violence of home; the burnt shell of the shop sat as a violent reminder in the street. He wondered when they would come to find him, if the fire had been enough. In the meantime they would go about restoration, and if any more firebombs came through the window they would send them back out with the new baseball bat Sarah kept under the countertop. Boyd discovered that the two floors under his empty apartment were up for rental and so they decided to move location to the new site by the bus depot. ‘It’s perfect,’ said Sarah, standing in the shitty room and looking down at the street below. ‘Put in some tables, have the book shop up here and the bakery below; people can sit where they like.’

Like the best of plans, the whole thing took some time to materialise. While the new store was being fitted out they took advantage of the town’s pop-up licensing and set up a temporary seating area on the street corner. Will constructed the whole thing out of wood and corrugated PVC, an enclosed cabin-like space for customers to take their coffee insulated from the oncoming cold. To make it cosy Sarah stapled-gunned as many blankets as she could get her hands on all over the wall, and piles more adorned the benches and stools. ‘It’s a bit flammable, d’you not think?’ commented Will after he finished attaching metal piping to catch the condensation run-off. ‘Kind of asking for them to have another go.’ Sarah flipped him the bird, tacking up another throw. 

The spot became a kind of curiosity, folks intrigued by the fire filling the place after work and school. By the end of October the route to the kitchen and back was as routine to Boyd as a river trail to a muskrat; he figured he ought to have trodden a path in the ground by now so often did he carry coffees for the old men at their perpetual chess game. He pushed the swinging door open with his back, put the drinks down just in time to witness Mr. Ainsworth execute a double bishop mate on his outraged opponent. 

‘I believe I owe you,’ said Boyd, pressing ten dollars into the old man’s hand. Mr McAllister snorted disgustedly and passed over his own cash. ‘Chess game longer than the fall of Troy I came to think one of you’d die ‘fore I had to part with my money.’

‘Ah fuck you, son,’ crowed Mr. Ainsworth, clutching his winnings. ‘Ger, you want me to buy you another coffee? Shame it’s too late to sharpen up that woeful defence.’ 

Boyd left the old men to their bickering and bumped against a brown haired girl sitting behind him as he turned balancing crockery. ‘Sorry darlin’,’ he said. The girl looked up then across the table to her companion, expression sharp and questioning.

‘Boyd,’ said the the man rising from his chair to stand hands on hips before him, ‘If you call my daughter that again I just may have to shoot you.’ Loose and easy with a familiar challenge. 

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ Boyd said. Grin like a steel trap, taking in the man before him. ‘Raylan Givens, as I live and breathe. You gone full silver fox! Lookin’ good, man.’ The smile in his old friend’s eyes spread as Raylan laughed, ran a hand over the grey hair that was still thick and trimmed on his hatless head. Face to face across a room as if time had barely passed; as if the last time they had seen each other hadn’t been through prison perspex — and the memory of that too fond and sad to have a true place in the room with them now. This was just Raylan, in perpetuity, facing off against Boyd. 

‘You need a haircut,’ said Raylan. It was an easy jab, Boyd’s last haircut having been behind bars before his release. He had taken to wearing his hair pushed back past his ears, temples peppered with grey to match Raylan. Sign of the times.

‘Maybe so, but there are more pressin’ issues at hand — such as introducin’ your own flesh and blood,’ said Boyd. ‘Pleasure to make your acquaintanceship at last, miss.’ 

‘Your mother would kill me if she knew we’d come here,’ Raylan muttered to his daughter and she grinned, good teeth and a straight nose and clearly the product of two fine looking parents. Boyd remembered her mother, rock steady and beautiful at Helen Givens’ graveside; both mother and daughter had the same look. ‘Boyd this is my daughter Willa; Willa, this is Boyd Crowder…from back home in Kentucky.’ 

‘Hi,’ said Willa, with a wave. ‘Nice to meet you. Apart from the subterfuge, I guess.’ 

Raylan crinkled his nose. ‘Your mother just wouldn’t appreciate this particular detour. She’s a woman of strong opinions.’ Willa rolled her eyes.

‘Well apart from deceivin’ the mother of your child, what brings you all the way to Oregon?’ asked Boyd. ‘I don’t flatter myself so highly as to think you came all this way to see me.’ 

‘We’re doing a road trip,’ said Willa. ‘To California.’ 

‘I’m droppin’ Willa off to LA,’ said Raylan, leant against a table with his cowboy boots crossed at the ankle. ‘Figured we’d get some father-daughter time together while Winona and Richard and the twins live it up without us. Been on the road for a week.’ He turned to Willa. ‘What was that thing we saw in Arizona?’ 

‘The Grand Canyon?’

‘Hell, that was just some hole in the ground. Now what really impressed me was that campsite decked out like the Flintstones. Worth payin’ money for.’ She laughed and Boyd saw Raylan in that moment and the moments before: a father, making his daughter’s face brighten with laughter for the past twelve years. 

Boyd put down the stacked cups, aware that somewhere behind him the old men were sitting listening like a pair of particularly hearing impaired and gossipy hawks. Said, ‘Still, somewhat outta your way comin’ up here.’

‘Willa wanted to do Route 66. We went to Portland, now doin’ the west coast down; see the  redwoods and all that. And seein’ as I happened to check in with your parole officer, knew where you were, I thought, why not check in on my old buddy Boyd while I’m at it?’

‘Man, you don’t know how to take a holiday,’ said Boyd wanting to laugh at _Old buddy Boyd —_ said for Willa’s benefit no doubt, as well as the old men if Raylan happened to have noticed them eavesdropping. Which knowing Raylan, he had. ‘Gentlemen, if you’re not otherwise occupied I don’t suppose I could leave my daughter in your care while Boyd and I step outside?' 

‘Step outside?’ coughed McAllister. ‘How pure is your intent?’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘I gotta direct line to the police,’ said Mr. Ainsworth, brandishing an ancient mobile phone and the memory of Boyd’s bloodied face. ‘This time I’m calling the cops, so watch yourself sonny.’  

Raylan raised his eyebrows in bewilderment as the two old men glared daggers across the cafe. ‘I ain’t aimin’ to do nothin’ but talk to him. Don’t know what you think I’m into.’

‘Raylan here’s with the U.S. Marshal Service,’ said Boyd. ‘And it bein’ so long since we’ve seen each other I think the old grievances’ll stay down a bit longer. Look, Miss Willa, you sit down with these old fogeys and by the time your daddy comes back you’ll be a regular Garry Kasparov.’ 

‘We’ll settle for Bobby Fischer,’ Mr. McAllister said, patting the chair beside him. ‘You know anything about chess, young lady?’ 

‘Can a lady get a drink first?’ 

‘Pardon me ma’am, the service is terrible round here,’ said Boyd, standing to attention. He took her order and left them at the chess board, Ainsworth already starting to coach his young prodigy on opening moves while Raylan stood and watched with thinly disguised amusement. He half expected them to be gone when he got back, a product of his imagination and nothing more — but there was Willa smiling up in thanks as he put a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows down beside the chessboard and Raylan turning the salt cellar over in his hands.

‘Raylan, I got something you got to try.’

‘I don’t —’

‘It’s got two of your favourite things in.’

‘I make a point of not hittin’ the sauce this early in the morning,’ said Raylan, peering into the mug before him. ‘Is that..?’ 

‘Not alcohol.’ The scoop of vanilla ice-cream below Raylan’s nose dissipated in a melting swirl as Boyd poured a shot of espresso. Raylan took the mug in his ringed hand, sipped. Boyd watched.

‘I don’t usually drown my ice-cream in my coffee,’ said Raylan with a wry face. ‘Although, that’s…good. Real good.’ 

Boyd watched him sip the drink as he tied up his apron and buttoned up his corduroy jacket. ‘Ah you know, the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream, _'_ he said, feeling unused levity trip into his tone. 

Raylan made a face at the inscrutable reference as he downed the affogato, and they stepped out the door together with a wave to Willa and the old men.  As they crossed the road  Boyd took a long sideways look at the man at his side. ‘I see there you’ve acquired a hitch in your step Raylan. There a story there or old age just takin’ its toll?’ 

Raylan shrugged, customary loosehipped gait tripping slightly heavier on one foot. ‘See when I go to work I often draw against various hardened criminals in the line of duty. If you recall.’

‘You _out_ -draw various hardened criminals. That being your modus operandi.’

‘Well, one day the other guy drew first.' 

Boyd said, ‘I find that hard to imagine.’ Raylan in his mind’s eye rattlesnake-quick, a blurred arm and a bullet to have Boyd on the floor with blood pumping up and through his chest before he even raised his gun. What was Raylan Givens without his famous fast-draw?

‘Put me down with a bullet to the knee, then went and killed two hostages ‘fore shootin’ his brains out,’ said Raylan, tone light but there was a noted a hardening in his jaw, muscle taught across his cheek. ‘First time for everything I guess.’

‘We’re not as young as we once were, Raylan. Can’t outdraw old age.’

‘I ain’t rollin’ in my grave quite just yet, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘Ain’t sayin’ that. Just strikes me your identity as a hard-assed sharpshooter can’t withstand time. All tough sonsofbitches crumble eventually: your daddy, for example.’

Heat flared to Raylan’s ears. ‘Christ, just shut up. He seemed pretty damned tough as nails up til the end, kilt Hunter Mosley if you remember.’ Boyd shut up, wondered why he had to mention Arlo when his son had set about burying the old man’s memory before he was even dead. 

They walked on in silence, past the high school and the floodlit baseball pitch. A kid was running the bases to loud cheers from his teammates and Boyd found himself up in the bleachers watching Raylan hit a home run with Wade Messer yelling his voice hoarse beside him, howling ‘Raylan _Fuckin’_ Givens, that’s our boy!’ fit to burst until Bowman silenced him with a coke dunked over his head. 

Maybe Raylan was thinking of other less noble scenes from the pitch. Collar up and his mind clearly elsewhere. Finally said, abruptly: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you got out.’ 

‘Dangerous habit to get into. I don’t blame you for breakin’ that one, lest it be an encouragement.' 

A pause. ‘You know, I got your letters.’ The day was chilly and grey and they stood and watched a freight train rattling dully down the tracks, eastbound, obscuring the blurred passage of cars on the highway beyond. Raylan was looking straight ahead as he said it, like he was making an observation on the weather, unreadable.

‘It’s a help to the man inside to have someone other than God to talk to,’ said Boyd, ‘Seein’ as you never told me to quit I’m ‘fraid I kept at it.’ Tugging at his scarred ear, gaze cast down. 

Raylan chuckled. ‘Guys at the office would say _You got another one!_ each time and there I’d be rollin’ my eyes like it was some fan mail from a serial killer with a crush or some shit, but I read each one. I did read them.’

‘Like with God, Raylan, I never felt like you had a responsibility to reply to me. Just felt good to think of you out in the world.’ Raylan’s coat flapped in the wind and Boyd closed his eyes briefly, felt the breeze on his face. ‘I’m glad. Your daughter…Looks like she got the best parts of you.’

When he opened his eyes Raylan was looking right at him. ‘I sure wouldn’t wish the worst on her.’

 

* * *

 

With the heater blasting and the Lincoln’s windscreen wipers going full pelt, leaving Oakridge was definitely proving one of the worst weather days of Raylan and Willa’s road trip. Raylan snuck a glance at his daughter, bundled up in one of his old flannels with her head on the window, patiently enduring his choice of music; all things considered, Hank Williams was mild revenge for his daughter’s sadistic ninety minutes of musical theatre earlier that morning. ‘How you feelin’ bug?’

‘Fine,’ Willa said, rubbing her eyes and yawned like a cat. She turned down Hank and his belief that wealth would not save one’s soul (a clear offence of the in-car rules) to look at him and ask the question etched in a frown on her forehead. ‘So…Coffee and ice-cream huh? Your favourites.’ 

He kept his eyes on the road. ‘Yep.’

‘How come you never talked about him before?’

‘Oh, me and Boyd?’ he said, imagining what Winona would think if he told their daughter about the contradictions and violence of his home town. ‘We haven’t always been friends…or well, we haven’t always acted friendly towards each other.’

‘But he knows you,’ she said, frowning. ‘Like, really well.’

‘Yeah,’ said Raylan, thinking about the barn: the test of Raylan’s code and his anger. Boyd, the catalyst, asking the silent question with his eyes and his pain and the gun loose in his palm. He knew the man Raylan was as well as Raylan knew himself. The man who would not shoot in cold blood. ‘Yeah, you could say that,’ he said as he turned up the music one-handed with a casual finality. ‘Boyd knows me.’

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Emperor of Ice-Cream is a poem by Wallace Stevens. 
> 
> Raylan is finally a part of the story, please forgive the interminable wait. He's a tricky fellow. Comments welcome and appreciated!


	10. Chapter 10

 

 

 

> _ I wanted to hurt you but the victory is I could not stomach it. _
> 
> **Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain**

 

* * *

 

 

‘For the last time,’ said Layla Foster as she poured her morning coffee with such force that the resulting splashes scalded her hand, ‘I am _not_ going to get all prettied up to talk into a camera ‘bout interior decoratin’. I ain’t got the articulation nor the inclination to talk about something people are there to hear you talk about.’ Her colleague and boss, Soo-jin, pouted as she had done the last twenty times they’d held this conversation. ‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘It’s got your name on the front and it’s your face people want to see.’ 

Layla walked to her desk and sat down, ignoring the pointed glare Soo-jin gave her from where she stood with her hands on her floral-patterned hips. ‘What, working together six years isn’t long enough for you?,' asked Soo-jin. 'You still won’t let me pay you full-time, Layla, even though you’re a part of this business as much as this piece of machinery. And I like you a lot more, you know.’  

‘Oh stop,’ said Layla, ‘Besides, I don’t have a face for video.’ The thought of having her face online for anyone to see struck her as an awful idea. 

‘Well, not when you’re making that face you don’t — you look like I’ve asked you to eat a whole lemon. Just give it a thought, okay?’ 

‘All right,’ said Layla, thinking _the day I run your interior design vlog is the day I leave this town and Oregon state for good_ but not saying it. ‘Let’s just get this meeting over with, right?’

‘Okay. It sounds like fun, doesn’t it? I like doing small businesses, getting across their character,’ Soo-jin said, collecting her portfolios and papers in a great messy pile. Layla swiped at a few precarious files as they began to slide to the floor but only succeeded in spilling the remainder of her coffee down her front.

All in all it was a bad beginning to a bad day.

Ten minutes later and more flustered than a whore in a nunnery, Layla walked into the meeting wearing a ridiculous pop-art button-down of Soo-jin’s unsuccessfully hidden under her cardigan. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said. Soo-jin winked from the table where she had the bookshop proposals already spread out for review, and introduced the small butch woman that rose to shake her hand as their client Sarah. ‘My pleasure,’ Sarah said; Layla shaking her hand saying _how nice_ _it was to meet at last_ and other inanities while moving on to the man beside Sarah with his hand outstretched to greet her, much too late by the time Layla met his gaze to prepare for the shock wave that hit like a fist to the gut. 

She froze, dumbly paused mid-sentence. The part of her that was Layla Foster shattered in the face of memory, slamming her back to the past where she was not Layla but Ava and she shared the last name of the man sitting before her: Boyd Crowder, to his credit looking as dumbfounded as she did. The moment of recognition crackling like a live wire between them. 

‘ _Oh_ ,’ he said, him she had not expected or hoped to ever see again; the part of her saying Boyd Crowder would not forgive nor forget screaming out its truth in her rising heartbeat. But he had no weapon, his face worn and pained. Lines deeper and grey streaked behind his ears and through his pushed back forelock, no longer electric and reactionary. A deadened charge. The fear and and shock threatening to choke her whirled around her head but as she saw his outstretched hand something in her broke. 

His hands: she had always loved his hands with his square deft fingers, coal dust under the nails, his ridged thumbnail, the calluses and scars — someone had ruined one of his lovely hands. Hands that had held her and yet had also killed. The way the two fingers had been so obviously ripped from him against his will, the white scarring twisting and roping in great chunks up the back of his hand, his divoted middle finger: they had held him down but he had struggled. The cruelty of it overwhelmed her. Without meaning to she began to cry, great helpless shuddering sobs, unbidden; perhaps it was the fear, the shock, the pity and sorrow mixing together in hot tears burning her face. 

The lack of noise in the room was dreadful. Ava covered her mouth and tried to contain the sudden weeping that had overtaken her as Soo-jin and Sarah watched with veiled embarrassment and confusion. Boyd sitting like a statue or a dead man with his maimed hand lowered, muscle twitching in his jaw like a contained scream, masked skull for a face. 

‘I —’ said Ava, and fled the room. 

 

* * *

 

When she found the note later she was composed, ready, but still the sight of his looping scrawl threatened to unseat the wild feeling balanced in her throat. Scrap of paper jammed into the rubber window seal, folded over and over. _I mean you no harm. I’m sorry._ She pressed her fingers to her trembling mouth, exhaled a long and measured breath. Didn’t even question how he had guessed which car was hers; it was Boyd. He knew her.

 

* * *

 

‘Ahh,’ said Boyd, hands tugging his hair. ‘I feel the need to do something foolish. ’ The swing of the pine freshener and the indescribable events of the last half hour hung between them. Sarah her eyes firmly on the road and Boyd cradling his head in both palms, both not going to talk about it. He raised himself and looked out at the renewed landscape: renewed now she walked upon it, revenant. ‘Let me out here.’

‘No,’ said Sarah, resolute.

‘I need you to let me out.’

‘I’m not going to let you do…whatever it is you’re going to do.’ 

‘I’m gon’ have a drink, that’s what. Let me out. _Goddamn_ , woman!’ he said as they passed a roadside bar without slowing. He felt like he had a shot of whiskey trapped hot and tumbling in his sternum, expanding and rising with wild heat. A real drink was what he needed. 

The temperance movement had nothing on Sarah. ‘You’re coming back to ours. We don’t have to talk about it, but I am not letting you loose in the state you’re in.’

‘And what state would that be? Elucidate, by all means.’

‘You’re upset. I’m taking you home.’ 

‘ _Home_ ,’ said Boyd. He had once known that word as Ava, would have lived anywhere if she had been there at his side. How odd that meaning could slip and change when least expected to he that liked definitions, words. For a moment he battled the urge to fling open the car door and jump, Sarah’s concern and his health be damned; the impact of the ground could not be as hard hitting as seeing her _here_ , alive and well and free from him and Harlan both. Instead he allowed Sarah to bring him into her house and hand him a cheap bottle of whiskey. She left before he could bring himself to thank her.

 He proceeded to get steadily, joylessly drunk.

 

* * *

 

In the coming weeks there was a noted change in Boyd. Since coming to Oakridge he had been low-spoken and steady but now he seemed to withdraw into himself, quiet hardening into something like anger and a high-strung watchfulness settling tight in the bones of his face. The occasional loud crowd-pleasing bursts of charm trickled away to nothing; when he smiled, the smile was a baring of teeth and nothing more. He still showed up to work, spoke to Sarah courteously with no sign that barely a fortnight had passed since he had drunk himself into a stuporon her living room floor. It scared her. At night he disappeared for long stretches at a time.

She looked for any sign to see if he wanted to talk about it: the thing they would not talk about —she had tried to show him the plans from the designers, to get a reaction, but he just nodded and handed back the papers saying, ‘I trust that whatever they’ll do will be satisfactory. I know it.’ She had not tried again.  

‘It’s not up to you,’ said Will kissing her head when she articulated her concerns. ‘He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do.’  

‘You weren’t there,’ she said. Will hadn't seen his face, the blonde woman’s inexplicable and uncontainable reaction, the wild grief and something else sparked by the meeting. ‘You don’t understand.’ 

‘Maybe so,’ agreed Will. ‘But this is not our business, right? There ain’t force on earth that’d make that man talk ‘bout whatever got him so…introspective. I like him too, but I suspect there’s whole worlds of shit that we got no right to start excavating.’

The work on the new bakery tipped on into November, the noise of sawing and building coming to an end under Boyd’s apartment as the weather turned wet and cold. Frosted windshields. Water streaming on the inside of the windows in the morning. Despite her business partner’s absences Sarah was gripped by excitement as the place started coming together; new tables and new chairs, new paint and pictures and shelves to make the whole thing not a mad dream but reality. And while Boyd was closed off and hard to read she had found a list of books for the shop in his handwriting on the unfinished counter — a sign that he was not about to drop off the face of the earth, she thought. Still engaged in their work.

‘I can’t help but notice that this is somewhat different to your original plan,’ said Boyd as they stood upstairs in the finished bookshop. He touched one of the heavy dark wooden shelves, withdrew his hand. It was true, they had decided on a clean and white and modern and this was not it. 

‘The designer came back with some changes, and you said to go with whatever they proposed. Don’t you like it?’

Boyd was looking at the stuffed armchairs, the knitted throws, the maps framed on the wall, the stove in the corner, the shelves ready to be filled with books with an oddly wounded expression; Sarah swore she saw his eyes dampen before he turned away. Cleared his throat. ‘Ah, that is to say, it’s perfectly adequate. I believe it is. Did she say —’ Cut himself off. 

He flicked one of the mason jars holding the lightbulbs above his head, steadied it as it swung back into his grip. ‘It’s like home.’

 

* * *

 

Boyd stayed in the bookshop until dark fell, thinking of Ava. It was like she had transplanted a piece of Harlan right into his life, the homely wood-stained quality of it. Was this forgiveness? She had thought of him and thought of him well. All signs that she knew him. Could she have thought of him in hatred and still given him this place, a mirror image of home? He groaned and got up, tramping down the whitewashed stairs to the cafe street-lit in the gloom below. Locked the door behind him.  

Across the street, Raylan Givens straightened from where he had been leaning against the tailgate of Boyd’s truck and raised a hand in greeting. Boyd stood for a moment taking him in, then strode over and took a handful of Raylan’s jacket. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

‘Hey hey hey,’ said Raylan, taking Boyd’s arm and pulling himself free. ‘What kinda welcome is that? I’ve been freezin’ my ass off waitin’ for you to show.’

‘Ain’t my problem if you lose a ball or two to frostbite casin’ my apartment, Raylan,’ snarled Boyd, walking on down the street with Raylan a few steps behind. ‘May it be the least of your worries.’ 

They continued in increasingly tense silence until Raylan said, irritated, ‘You got better things to do, that it? Well, pardon me for comin’ all the way back up here to see you.’ Boyd spun around then, jawline bunched and barely containing a curse. Raylan took a step back with a hand to his hip. ‘Thought that after our last meeting things were settled, but seein’ the look on your face right now I feel I ought to be reachin’ for my gun. What do you think?’

Boyd said, feeling himself loud and angry, ‘I think you oughta explain to me how it is, against all rhyme and reason and your goddamn word, that my late fiancé and sister-in-law Ava Crowder is alive and well. Why don’t we start there?’

Something in Raylan’s face slackened with surprise. ‘Aw _shit._ ’ He pushed back his hair and stood looking at Boyd’s trembling rage, working up his own until his voice matched Boyd’s in anger. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know why. Same reason I have a hand hoverin’ at my belt.’

‘I mourned her! I wept for her, and even though I ain’t anywhere near Catholic, I goddamn prayed for her very soul.’

‘Well, you did lose her.' 

‘Fuck you, Raylan Givens! You lied to my face: me meaning her no harm and not able to do so, being in prison as I was, and still you lied. And you knew. Goddamn lawman havin’ a fugitive in his sights and not feelin’ the need to _do his job_ , which as I recall is the crux of your uncompromising need to be an asshole.’ 

‘Calm down, Boyd,’ said Raylan, palms up and unwavering. 

Boyd stepped up. Slipping back into anger, ready to fight Raylan: the old familiar role. ‘I am getting sick of your damn mercy, Raylan. What, after you graciously refuse to put me down like a dog you get soft? Start to let a few things slide, let Ava off the fuckin’ hook?’

‘I don’t have my badge on so it ain’t assault of a federal officer when you swing at me, jus' so you know,’ said Raylan shrugging out of his jean jacket and rolling up his sleeves, gun on the ground.

‘I don’t want to do this,’ said Boyd. ‘Many people called me crazy along the years, but it was only upon seeing her I thought I had truly gone mad, or haunted, or whatever shit people tell themselves when they see their dead woman walking the earth in bumfuck, Oregon.’

‘I thought it would be safer,’ said Raylan softly. ‘For her.' 

‘And what about me?’ said Boyd, taking a fistful of Raylan’s shirt and only then seeing how unsteady the other man was on his feet, how loose he was. ‘Damn son, but are you drunk right now?’ 

‘Somewhat,’ said Raylan, ornery facade doing a fair job of hiding how liquored up he was. ‘I didn’t mean for it to happen but it did.’ He fumbled with the jacket on the ground and pulled out a fifth of whiskey, drained the last drops and straightened up. ‘Don’t let me interrupt what you got going on, come on, let’s have at it.’

‘Fuck you, Raylan. This sucks.’

‘I know, fuck me. There waitin’ on you and I get this phone call and then I think, "By God I need a drink right now, too bad Boyd and all his grievances ain’t here to pull me out from it," so I have a damn drink. Or several.' 

‘You best sit down and sober up,’ said Boyd, gesturing at a iron park bench already spotted with half-iced dew. Their breath in vaporous clouds, and Raylan shivered in his shirtsleeves with a stubborn glare in his eye.  

‘We ain’t done,’ Raylan said, pulled at Boyd’s arm. Boyd jerked back from his touch and quite accidentally connected his elbow with Raylan’s nose with force; Raylan staggered clutching blood to his face, an anger of his own rising. ‘ _Jesus,_ fuck!’ 

‘Raylan, I —‘ began Boyd full of apology but Raylan was already leaping at him with swinging fist. They fell over the bench headlong and into an empty vegetable garden, Raylan getting in a few good hits before Boyd kicked him hard in the stomach. They collapsed in a slow brutal tangle, dry soil flinging up into eyes and mouths as they gouged and punched at each other. Raylan’s horseshoe ring bust Boyd’s lip and there was blood in his mouth as he hit Raylan openhanded across the face. A beat: Raylan straddled Boyd in the dirt, eyes wide with consternation as he finally spluttered, ‘Boyd, did you just bitchslap me?’  

They looked at each other for a long moment, the handprint blooming across Raylan’s face until he leant over and was violently sick in the upset earth around them. Boyd shoved him off with a noise of disgust and Raylan crouched on all fours, heaving until there was nothing left. ‘We’re too old for this shit,’ muttered Boyd. Raylan let out a wet laugh more like a choking cough.  

A bus pulled up at the depot next door and they knelt and listened to the passengers unloading their bags, hexagonally patterned light spilling out onto the garden through the chainlink fence. ‘You saw her?’ asked Raylan, wiping his nose with his hands. ‘When?’

‘Week before last. She looked…normal. Happy, ’til — I don’t know.’ Boyd spat a mouthful of blood and together they got to their feet like a pair of old men. 

‘Him too?’ asked Raylan, and perhaps if he had not been drunk he wouldn’t have asked but it was too late. Boyd frowned, going still. 

‘She got a man, that it? Married? Can't blame her, after so long.’ 

Raylan staggered and held onto Boyd’s collar, his boots slipping in the mud as they climbed up to the anchor of the bench and street light. Some conflict tugging at his mouth. Raylan’s expression uncharacteristically unguarded thanks to the liquor; Boyd could see as plain as day that he was deciding whether or not to lie. Again. 

‘Raylan…you think long and hard ‘bout what answer you gon’ give next. Or I swear to God Almighty that I will leave you on this damn bench and you can freeze to death all I care.’

The words slow coming out of Raylan’s mouth. ‘She’s got a son, Boyd. A boy. Your son.’ 

Boyd didn’t remember sitting but sure enough he was on the bench and Raylan was cursing on the ground from where he dropped him, but the only words he could hear were y _our son_ over and over again and he looked at his hands in wonder and tried to feel something other than sickly surprise and rising fear. Raylan was calling him some insult or other but he didn’t care, any name better for him than father. Something wet on his face, blood or tears he didn’t know. _Your son. Your son._ ‘I have a son,’ he said and the words sounded like truth even to his sinner’s ears.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ava and Raylan, so suddenly back in Boyd's life? Apologies for the use of coincidence as a plot device but Boyd accidentally finding out Ava is very much alive was too deliciously painful to ignore. 
> 
> Hope the few of you that are keeping up with this enjoy the ride! 
> 
> Comments: appreciated :)


	11. Chapter 11

 

> _ Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another? _
> 
> ** William Faulkner, Light In August **

 

* * *

  

Looking down at the mattress on his floor, Boyd reflected that it was beyond hope that his parole officer might fail to notice the bloodied half-naked man lying there in an unconscious stupor. He half-heartedly rearranged the bedspread to cover Raylan’s torso but the noise of irritation Raylan grunted into the pillow was enough to make him abandon his efforts. Instead he smoothed the collar of his white button-down and went to join Jack Green in the kitchen.

She was finishing her inventory of his fridge: nothing among the half pack of bacon and egg carton to be worthy of note. No alcohol at least. It was a sparse living space — only so many places she could look before they had to head into the open room that served as his bedroom. ‘And in here?’ Green asked, gesturing to the door at Boyd's back. 

‘Be my guest,’ said Boyd, stepping aside to let her through. He mentally kicked himself. What with Raylan’s unexpected appearance and _that_ particular bombshell no wonder he had forgotten the scheduled home inspection. God _damn_ Raylan. 

Green took in the empty space, the boxes of CDs perched on the ancient tape deck, the stack of half a dozen books and empty coffee cups. His few clothes hanging uniformly from a rack. Everything neat and accounted for apart from Raylan’s clothes and the man himself spreadeagled under Boyd’s blankets, limbs akimbo. It looked…well, Boyd knew what it looked like. Not that it went against his parole but it galled him to want to explain himself, and because of Raylan at that. 

Boyd folded his arms and pointedly watched the traffic in the street below. Tried not to notice Green looking between his split lip and Raylan’s bruised face like two and two just might equal four. To top it off Raylan chose that moment to roll over and hug the pillow tighter, mumbling ‘ _Boyd…?’_

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ said Jack, her long black hair swinging as she crouched at his side. ‘I’m Mr. Crowder’s parole officer, conducting an inspection of the premises.’ 

‘Doesn’t it say _reasonable hours_ somewhere in the book?’ said Raylan, doing a bad job at appearing conscious. 

Boyd considered the merits of gouging out his own eyes rather than watch the scenario unfolding in Jack Green’s head. ‘It is a reasonable hour, jackass.'

‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask…is this situation consensual?’ asked Green, her pen poised at the ready. 

‘Is _what_ consensual?’ 

‘The situation between you and the probationer Mr. Crowder.’ 

Raylan, to his merit, cracked open his eyes and stared at Green for a good ten seconds before laughing fit to burst. ‘Oh man,’ he said, wiping his eyes and dissolving into silent chuckling with his hands spread on his chest, ‘That’s a good one.’ They both looked down at him, unsmiling; Boyd covered his eyes. Raylan’s amusement stilled. ‘Are you serious?’ he coughed, realising for perhaps the first time that he was shirtless and lying in Boyd’s bed. 

He looked between Boyd -- in the corner re-enacting all the suffering of the stations of the cross -- and the parole officer, then back at Boyd who shrugged resignedly at him. Whatever truth Raylan said was going to sound like lies -- so he lied. ‘I mean, yes officer,’ unloading as much charm as humanely possible, 'Totally consensual. Is what I meant by that.’ 

Boyd made a choked sound behind them.

Once Green had made her final observations Boyd took great solace in leading her to the door and shutting it behind her. He let out a sigh of relief, called out, ‘Raylan, I am going to kill you.’

‘Already made that threat and they still let you out,’ said Raylan, rolling over. ‘And please, keep your voice down. I got this miniature buffalo stompin’ around my skull tryna get out.’

‘God forbid you lose any sleep. Do me a favour and refrain from talkin’ to me at least three hours, okay?’

‘Easiest favour you ever called in.’

‘I don’t know which is worse, her thinkin’ we’ve been fightin’ or fuckin’.’

‘Maybe she’ll take a positive spin on things. After all,’ said Raylan putting on a read-by-rote voice, ‘ _recidivism_ is _reduced when defendants develop and maintain prosocial bonds to family, school, and work_ and whatever.’ 

‘ _Ha ha._ Not to mention the goddamn gun sitting under your jacket set to land me back in the joint,’ said Boyd. He kicked the denim, revealing the holstered Glock underneath. ‘Escaped by the skin of my teeth on that only by providence.’

‘You’re lucky you got so many of them then,’ said Raylan, muffled, just loud enough for Boyd to flash him the finger with his good hand on his way out. 

 

* * *

 

‘Man,’ said Will when Boyd entered the bakery kitchen, ‘You met anyone yet who didn’t want to beat you bloody?’ He shrugged down off his perch on the counter and surveyed Boyd with a critical eye. ‘And even under the beating you still look like shit.’

‘Why thank you Will, most complimentary of you,’ said Boyd helping himself to a fresh bread roll. Steam hissing out as he broke it apart. ‘You here to remark on my appearance or is there something pressing at hand?’

‘Bram’s missing,’ said Sarah, emerging from the storage room with a trolley stacked high with uncooked pastries. ‘Dog’s never been gone before, I mean he’s gotten out but he always comes back for feeding. Will thinks he heard someone come by in the night.’

‘You tellin’ me someone stole your dog?’ 

Will scratched a shaving cut on his neck. ’I don’t know. Barking and a truck but I though that was the next house over.’

Boyd tore the bread into tiny pieces with his fingers until it resembled a meagre eucharistic offering. Thought about it, the hills and trees and time to talk in the open. ‘We’ll take the truck and look for him. Take a jaunt in the local countryside.’

‘Will’s working later on.’

‘Raylan came back into town last night,’ he said casually. Bruised knuckles burning.

‘Daddy of that girl you left in the clutches of the chess-fiends? No wonder he laid into you,’ said Sarah, half joking. 

‘Technically I struck the first blow, but yes. That Raylan.’

‘Oh shit. You two got a history?’

‘Depends what your definition of history means.’ They were mincing around it but he felt no need to be an open book, not with the tireless revelation of the night before still pounding inside his head.

‘Ainsworth, in all his colourful language, implied that — well he said he was surprised you didn’t kiss the fellow goodbye,’ said Sarah without inflection. ‘But the old man’s a lecherous bastard, so…’ She wasn’t looking at him, engaged as she was with the oven. Just light talk, old man’s gossip. Not that Will was awkwardly picking at his nail beds like he expected some kind of emotional revelation. 

Boyd thought it a mite hypocritical to respond in anger when the man in question was likely still in his bed, so he crossed his arms and said with as little feeling as possible, ‘Raylan tried his damnedest to put me behind bars, with success, and on more than one occasion we have tried to kill each other. He left me with a bullet in my chest.’ Hand on the spot under his shirt. ‘And before that we dug coal together — that history enough for you?’

The slack horror on both of their faces would have been comical if he were less tired. ‘Jesus,’ said Will. ‘I thought you were friends.’

Boyd scratched the nape of his neck, laughed without humour. ‘Funnily enough, I’d consider Raylan my oldest friend in the world. Not that he’d admit it. Or maybe he would; been some time since he’s aimed a gun at me.’ With that he snagged another hot roll, and saluting with the bread exited their presence with a final promise to set looking for the dog.

The street was drab with wet and the trucks that drove past sent sprays of muddy water up onto the sidewalk. Champing and stamping his feet, Boyd mounted the two flights of stairs to his apartment half expecting Raylan to be still asleep but the mattress lay vacated with sheets a mess. Longlegged figure instead leaning in silhouette against the paned window. 

Raylan turned at the clatter of the door. ‘I got a bucket full of vomit and no place to empty it,’ he said as way of greeting. ‘Did consider chuckin’ it out the window but thought that might upset your neighbours.’

Boyd took in the pale tiredness of the other man, the silver on his jaw and hungover stoop. ‘In that case I’m terribly grateful for your consideration,’ he said, tossing him the bread roll. ‘Get your coat. We’re goin’ for a drive.’

To his credit Raylan didn’t question it, just pulled on his boots and jacket and holstered his gun and followed Boyd to the truck cramming fresh bread into his mouth. Boyd sloshed the bucket’s contents out into the storm drain and left it to sit by the apartment door. ‘Sooner the building work’s done the better,’ he remarked, cranking on the engine first time. 

Raylan settled into the passenger seat with his legs crossed and closed his eyes as they pulled out of town. ‘You wanna explain where in the hell we’re going?’

‘Well, marshal, we got ourselves a missing canine case. If you want to conduct proceedings be my guest, otherwise we’re goin’ to comb the area of its last sighting.’

‘Did you say _canine_? You’re kidding, right.’

‘You heard me. Keep an eye out for a black lab, blue collar; answers to the name of Bram.’

Raylan groaned. ‘This is a sad sign pointing to the end of my career. Reduced to huntin’ dogs.’ The road dipped below the tree-line, great firs lining the road as they wound the route to the Jackson house. He massaged the hollows of his eyes, looked over at Boyd. ‘I don’t remember kickin’ you out of your own bed. Pretty inconsiderate of me.’

‘Didn’t sleep anyway,’ said Boyd, his eyes on the road. ‘We don’t have to get into that, but if you’d indulge my interest Raylan I am mighty curious as to what got you needin’ the bottle so much last night you found no reason to abstain.’ 

Raylan all taut limbs and lines beside him; creases the last twelve years had wrought. ‘If you must know, Boyd,’ he said, not yet riled but clearly stirred, ‘I been on suspension last three weeks waitin’ for the whole panel of paper-pushin’ Internal Affairs hardasses to quit humming and ho-ing and get to a verdict. And they fuckin’ come to one last night.’

‘I take it, not in your favour.’

‘You remain keen as ever,’ said Raylan, and there was a hard line of restraint now bunching his jaw. ‘They said in so many words that my future as of now holds either a desk job or early retirement. Two choices I am just dyin’ to choose between.’

‘Hence the bottle.’ Boyd frowned. ‘Shot one person too many, that it? Didn’t think I’d live to see that day come.’

‘I, uh,’ said Raylan. 'I know why they gotta be seen takin’ action but it’s all the job. I never - so, there was this sex offender runnin’ us all over the state and I caught up to him. Pull my gun, do the usual _stop or I shoot_ shtick. He kept runnin’, so I shot.’ Boyd focused on the blacktop so as to not be seen looking at the angry tears reddening Raylan’s eyes. ‘Put him down, but uh, the bullet shatters a car window behind him and there’s a little kid inside. Little black kid. Him bleedin’ out in the street and this kid yellin’ fit to burst and the mom screamin’ at me?’ He let out a shuddery shade of a laugh with his eyes still burning. ‘Guess that’s when they decided I lost my touch.’

Boyd didn’t say anything for good minute. 'Recent political climate don’t help none.’

‘I don’t want to be lumped in with those shitheels. Thing is, I shoot one black fugitive and scar some innocent kid and they fuckin’ offer me a desk job — like that’s the worst they got.’ 

‘Unwillin’ to reap the benefits?’

‘At least Willa wouldn’t have to see her daddy’s shootings on the news if I was behind a desk.’ He sniffed angrily, hand balled in a fist on his knee. ‘But by God I hate...hey, is that a dog or a coyote up on that ridge?’

Boyd pulled onto the hard shoulder and they peered up at the low-moving shape picking its way across the scree. ‘Might even be a wolf,’ murmured Boyd, leaning to get a better look. A souped up 4x4 roared past them on their left and the animal paused then darted into the nearest scrub of bushes as the vehicle tore past. ‘Don’t think that was a dog in any case.’ 

They set off, silence settling as Boyd took in what Raylan had just told him. Raylan without the badge unthinkable. Clouds loomed low and grey as the road wound on, and any chances of finding a lone dog began to feel pretty slim. ‘Hey, Raylan,’ began Boyd looking to where the man had his face turned towards the window, ‘What happened to the hat?’

Raylan peered out the window. ‘That truck that passed us earlier circled around,’ he said, indicating the wing mirror and not answering the question. 

‘Don’t leap to change the subject,’ said Boyd, but true enough when he raised his eyes to the rearview there was a red Chevy in the road behind. Two passengers, a confederate flag on the bonnet. ‘Ah.’

Raylan shot him a dirty look. ‘What does _Ah_ mean in this scenario? We in trouble here?’

Boyd shifted up a gear. ‘If it is the gentlemen I suspect, things might take an ugly turn. They firebombed the bakery.’

‘You mean that wasn’t you?’ asked Raylan sardonically, checking his gun. The truck lights dipped and shone blindingly behind them as the sky darkened. He was fiddling with his phone, the light distracting at Boyd’s elbow. 

‘You better be texting your daughter goodbye,’ said Boyd. ‘On the off chance you get run off the road by a pair of thick-headed skins. Damn man, did you just take a selfie?’ 

‘No,’ said Raylan, without real effort to sound convincing. He tucked the phone back into his pocket and checked the mirror again. ‘Potential ugliness aside, it does do me good to see how that stupid shit still sticks to you like glue…especially after how you chose to roll in it in the first place.’

Boyd’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. ‘Don’t preach at me, Raylan. You weren’t there. And if any shit has been lumbered on me due to my actions, I fully accept it. Thought leavin’ Harlan would be a help.’

‘Well, you movin’ to a state with double the hate groups than Kentucky seems a sadly miscalculated effort to escape your past,’ said Raylan like he was trying to be funny. Boyd scowled. 

‘I’m sorry for not checkin’ in with the Anti-Defamation League ‘fore makin’ a change in my address,’ he hissed, and brought his attention back to the road just in time to see the truck sitting sideways across the road ahead. He hit the brakes, hard. Raylan swore as they jerked forward and almost stalled; they sat breathing heavily and looked out at the two heavyset men toting rifles before them. The truck following them came to halt with a dull skid. 

‘They don’t look friendly,’ said Raylan, reaching for his gun. ‘Want to whip off your shirt and wave your arm around, get all buddy-buddy over that fuckin’ tattoo?’

‘You attemptin’ to get my shirt off might give these fellas the wrong idea. They ain’t known for bein’ the most tolerant type.’ Boyd unbuckled his seatbelt and turned off the ignition. ‘Any more smart ideas?’

‘Just the one,’ Raylan said and brought his gun up to point directly at Boyd’s head.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay -- I did some re-formatting of the previous chapters to get rid of the double line-spacing but apart from that business continues as normal! Thank you for your kind words so far; comments as usual are very much appreciated.


	12. Chapter 12

 

> _ Who started it? The red spreading over white satin _
> 
> _ never to be washed away completely _
> 
> ** Katia Kapovich, Cossacks and Bandits **

 

* * *

  

What with two guns out of four pointed in Boyd’s direction and his own so recently aimed at the other man’s temple, Raylan figured Boyd to be sporting the short end of the stick in this particular showdown. Not that the remaining rifles covering his own person didn’t give him cause for concern. He squinted through the overblinding industrial light trained on them like a scene lifted out of a bad interrogation manual and shifted uselessly against the plastic ties that secured his arms and legs to the chair. The barn they sat in was slatted with odd rows of moonlight — a picturesque setting for a quiet night murder, if not for the lines of wire-caged pens filled with the din of at least thirty cacophonous dogs.

‘’Scuse me gentlemen,’ he said, calm but carrying over the loud barks and howls, ‘but d’you mind untyin’ myself and Mr. Crowder here and lettin’ us head on our way?’

‘Who’s this asshole?’ called the biggest fellow to Boyd. ‘It’s you we got a bone to pick with.’ 

‘Mine was the first bone. You’ll have to let me conduct my business ‘fore you get to yours,’ said Raylan, genial.

Big bald bastard waved Raylan’s gun right in his face, leaning in close. The cords of his neck like tree roots under his skin. ‘Well, mister,’ he said, ‘Seeing as you’re the one tied to a chair I think any business you have outstanding is gonna remain that way.’

Beside him Boyd sighed. ‘You gon’ argue about who gets to plant the first bullet in me all night? If that’s the case I’d rather you skip the foreplay and the five of you get down to it,’ he said, sounding pissed more than unsettled. ‘Jared, I know this ain’t your idea. Still time to let bygones be bygones.’

‘Only bygone,’ spat the big guy, ‘is you near tearing off my fucking arm.’ The weedy army-jacketed lackey next to him shifted uncomfortably, gaze averted from Boyd. Gun listing towards the ground. Raylan twisted his hands; he could feel the plastic against his nails but to no gain. 

‘And for that you burned down Boyd’s place of work, correct? So give me back my damn firearm and let me deal with him as I aimed.’

Boyd shook his head. ‘Why Raylan, I don’t know in whose company I’d rather be, what with both parties actin’ so antagonistic.’

The ringleader wiped the inked _88_ on the skin of his frontal bone and for a moment the light flashedridiculously off his shorn skull. ‘Listen,’ he said with his gun now levelled at Raylan’s chest, ‘You explain who you are and what it is you want with this cocksucker, we may come to some arrangement.’ 

‘I’m Raylan Givens. I put Boyd here in prison some twelve odd years ago in my capacity as U.S. Marshal,’ he said as plain as he could. ‘Now, you can imagine how disappointed I was to hear he got paroled, and well, let’s say in checkin’ in with him I discovered he was breakin’ the terms of his parole. Ain’t no reason not to drag him right back where he belongs.’

‘I didn’t see a badge, marshal.’

‘Let’s just say this is personal.’

Boyd bared a laugh ‘Loose with the law as ever, I see. You boys ought to get along fine. Why, just recently Raylan here shot a black man on the job like it was nothin, ain’t that right marshal?’

Raylan swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth. ‘That’s right.’ He was glad Boyd was playing the game but it was galling nonetheless to act like he was proud. Blood was pounding in his ears over the overlapping whining of the dogs in their cages. ‘There’s plenty opportunity to put one or two down. We're in the same game, if you boys ain't just playin' dress-up. ’

Jared keyed through the phone. ‘He doesn’t have any tattoos,’ he said looking at Raylan with a critical eye. 

‘I’m a Federal marshal for cryin’ out loud. You think I keep my job with that shit you got goin’ on? Privately they don’t give a hoot, but they’d sure fire you for the show of it. People can’t express anythin’ at all these days.’

‘Not even some ink where the sun don’t shine?’ said 88 with insinuation. 

‘I like to sleep with my colleagues, what can I say? Don’t want some secretary reportin’ me for havin’ a swastika on my ass.’

‘Sounds like you’re under the heel of some serious repressors of free speech, man,’ muttered Jared. Boyd lowered his head and snorted; Raylan thought he was the only one heard but 88 stepped up and backhanded Boyd across the face with sudden violence. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Hey, look at this,’ said Jared holding out the phone. ‘ _Unarmed black child critically injured in marshal shootout._ And a picture of Raylan Givens. Damn!’

88 took the phone with his bloodied hand, looked between it and Raylan and back at the phone. Expression changing to something akin to respect. Enough to turn Raylan’s stomach. ‘Untie our brother here,’ he said, and one of the gunmen in the shadows came forward and cut the bonds tying Raylan’s arms behind his back. He rubbed his wrists and tried not to look at Boyd. Swallowed his bile. 

‘Now with tattoos,’ he said easily once free, looping back to the shooting-free subject, ‘I don’t know enough about art to want one. You need to have a vision. Workin’ a case once, met an art dealer had a whole collection of Hitler paintings. Now, I don’t claim to know much ‘bout art appreciation but that man’s collection was the finest example I’ve seen. I admit I was moved.’ He saw Boyd shoot him a look out of the corner of his eye which he ignored. Feared if they made eye contact the absurdity of the whole facade would come crashing home.

‘Hitler? Really?’ asked Jared, impressed.

‘Yeah.’ 

‘Got to earn tattoos,’ said one of the hitherto silent gunmen. ‘I notice your friend here hasn’t looked after his properly.’ 

Boyd coughed some blood onto his lap, split lip Raylan had given him the night before now free-flowing. ‘Figured I never earned the right to discard my past ’til some Confederate Hammerskins kindly aimed to liberate me of it. Took it off my hands, as it were.’ He waggled his fingers behind his back. ‘Only half a skin now.’ 

With a frown 88 snatched the knife off his compatriot and cut the ties at Boyd’s wrists. He seized Boyd’s crippled hand, took in the remaining letters with a snarl. ‘What the fuck.’

‘See, Jared,’ said Boyd coolly, reaching up to unbutton his shirt, ‘it’s best to think long and hard ‘bout your actions while you still got time. What you choose’ll be with you for the rest of your goddamn life.’ He shrugged the shirt off his left shoulder and Raylan let in a breath of surprise. There was the black mark on his shoulder as he had expected, ugly and sharp edged — but only in part. The rest warped by a shiny white burn disfiguring the lower part of Boyd’s bicep, skin and the remaining half of the swastika tattoo void of pigment. 

Looking down at the burn Raylan momentarily forgot what role he was playing. 'Hammerskins do that too?’ he asked in mild horror.

Boyd was re-buttoning his shirt. A bad day for him to have chosen white; spots of blood already drying into the collar. ‘Gunnar Swift took my fingers,’ he said while the tattooed men around him subconsciously felt their own ink, imagining what kind of burn would strip the skin so. ‘But no. I did the shoulder myself. To relieve the man in question of that particular burden.’

‘Jesus,’ hissed Raylan, thinking that apart from a brief glance at the man’s file he had no idea what prison had been like; Boyd in his letters sticking to introspection of character with bare care for his day to day life. And now not the best time to inquire. 

A vein pulsed directly through the tattoo on 88’s forehead. ‘Jared, get this motherfucker up,’ he said. Pale eyes looking somewhat crazed. ‘Get this motherfucking traitor on his fucking feet. We’ve been branching out too much, fellas.’ He swung a meaty hand to gesture at the dogs, the barn. ‘Tell the boys it’s time to get back to our fucking roots. Gonna have our selves an old fashioned lynching.’

One of the gunmen whooped. They hauled Boyd up by the hair as Raylan followed trying to looked jazzed about the whole thing. It was dark outside and the sky was spattered with stars. He paused at the door as Jared passed by him. ‘Son, what’s with the dogs?’ he asked.

The young man’s tension dissipated as he explained. ‘We take them from people that aren’t deserving. We got jew dogs, spic dogs, black dogs-'

‘You paint the black dogs white?’

Jared looked up at him, unsure if Raylan was making fun of him or not. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not how it works. Bonus is, chicks love them.’

‘I see,’ said Raylan, thinking that it was the dumbest fucking thing he’d heard in a while. ‘You ever hear the one about the Edomites?’

Jared shook his lank-haired head as they walked toward the dark outline of a crooked tree. ‘Oh, Raylan,’ said Boyd from the ground where they’d deposited him, ‘I know you ain’t stupid enough to believe that mud-people story.’ The taller skinhead had his gun resting just shy of Boyd’s tilted head, him looking up at Raylan with a wry expression. ‘I believe our friends have gone to get a rope.’

‘We got time,’ said Raylan, meaning this to mean _Wait._ Meaning _Let me figure out a way to get us out of this alive._ Light spilled onto the lawn as the door of a ramshackle house opened and more Neo-Nazis trooped out as 88 and his sidekick emerged from behind the barn with a loop of thick rope. 88 chucked it to one of the new arrivals who looked down at it in stoned intrigue. 

Raylan used the ensuing comedy to gauge how many of the new men were armed. Among the gang of grown racists attempting to tie a noose, perhaps three were packing and none looked sober enough to shoot straight — struggling as they were to follow the internet’s knot-tying instructions. That left the two men with rifles, Jared, and the musclebound ringleader sporting Raylan’s gun.

One or two men handed out flaming torches like it was Halloween, atmosphere more carnival than hanging. The noose they finally flung over one of the sturdy tree branches above was twisted but looked set to hold. Raylan dragged Boyd to his feet, squeezed his forearm while Jared carried a chair to the patch of flat grass. Boyd said, very low, ‘I don’t feel so good about this, Raylan,’ and then they were forcing him to stand on the chair with the noose around his neck. His shirt and face white against the surrounding darkness. 

‘We’re going to hang ourselves a race-traitor tonight, brothers,’ yelled 88, fire dancing hellish patterns on his face. A few cheers. ‘For crimes against whites: associating with Jews and black bastards and rejecting the superiority of our own race. Lest we forget what happens,’ he said, ‘when you turn your back on brotherhood!’ One man nearly hit Raylan with his flaming torch as he spat at Boyd; the spittle hit short but it did prompt Raylan to confiscate the fire hazard from his grip.

Boyd gave a cough from his position above the mob. ‘I get any last words?’

‘One minute. S’all race traitors get.’ 

‘A generous address,’ conceded Boyd. He looked down at the mob, a peripatetic teacher coolly surveying the class before launching into speech. ‘I stand accused of associatin’ with Jews and black bastards: now gentlemen, I find that sentence harsh. Why, in regards to the latter when I meet any man I make no inquiry as to his parentage, so while he may be bastardous it is not a prerequisite for my society, black or white alike. Then again, if Don here is advocatin' that persons present should only fraternise with white by-products of wedlock I think they find themselves in good company.’ Boyd's teeth white and cutting as he grinned, holding the moment before raising his voice again.

‘What the fuck is he saying?’ whispered someone behind Raylan. Most of his compatriots were similarly confused, the few that got Boyd’s drift scowled but were too unsure of his language to heckle him down.

Raylan wanted to laugh very badly. Surely Boyd would appreciate the phrase _captive audience_  taken to such misapplied heights...if they both lived. He was reminded, standing as he was holding a torch at a Neo-Nazi lynching, that in another lifetime Boyd could have been an excellent politician. Some version of him in another time rousing a rabble, seditious and sharp as cut glass. 

‘As for Jews,’ Boyd said, ‘I can count the ones I know on this hand.’ Raised threefingered. ‘Among these I admit there is one Jew to whom I hold my particular affection -- our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’ A few loud boos and hisses broke out, but to Raylan’s dark amusement the men were still enthralled by the turn of events and the rising tempo of the man before them.

Boyd began to preach, patter and pitch re-emerging from the past so that with the noose around his neck he stood formidable above them in a stasis of martyrdom. ‘Brothers!’ he called, ‘The only brotherhood of any consequence is brotherhood in Christ, for there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, neither male nor female: being all one in Christ Je _sus_.’ Raylan realised he had never seen Boyd as preacher and firebrand with an audience, only heard the bemused mutterings of Harlan’s pious and un-pious up and down the holler.‘As I stand before you, condemned by man, I know that I am a _sinner_! I have sinned! And _yet_ , the Lord has granted his grace — no, not just to me but to each of you here.’ 

The upturned faces slack with bemusement in the fiery light. Raylan pulled himself from the tide of Boyd’s continuing words and looked around: to his left, the butt of a gun in a waistband. In reach. He gripped the torch and lowered it slightly, inched closer. ‘…I am not worthy,’ Boyd was chanting in metered timbre, ‘I am not worthy, but the _Lord_ delivers! Delivers us from our own dark doings by the power of his grace,’ said with his tied hands raised in prayerful supplication. ‘Father grant your holy word to each man here — not to spare my own life, but to bring them into your eternal glory. _Amen_.’

At his final word, several things happened at once. Firstly, the man in front of Raylan realised that he was on fire and let out a great howl of dismay that some took for unexpected holy fervour; at the same time Boyd brought his hands down with great violence and snapped the ties binding his wrists. In the mayhem Raylan seized the unguarded gun from its position and leapt through the crowd towards Boyd, but Don was there first with wild fury in his eye. Boyd succeeded in seizing the rope around his neck as Don kicked the chair aside and Raylan saw him drop into nothing, clutching at the rope above to take his struggling weight, feet kicking in the air for purchase. 

Raylan fired a shot. It hit the Nazi in the shoulder and he staggered back and Boyd kicked him in the head — deliberately or not Raylan could not tell. A bullet buried itself in the tree trunk; others had started shooting but there was no time to return fire. Boyd’s face going red. He raised the gun and sighted the swinging rope above, a shot in a thousand with the dark and his failing prowess and yet the shot rang true. Passed cleanly through. No sooner had Boyd collapsed on the ground to chokingly pull the noose from his neck than Raylan was pulling him up and across the field towards the barn. Bullets whizzed and sent the earth at their feet spitting up in tiny clods as they ran with erratic marksmen pursuing. 

They reached the barn. Raylan pushed Boyd through and pulled the chain and padlock across the entrance just as twin bullets hammered the corrugated metal where his head had been. The dogs howled and squalled in their cages, forefeet up against the mesh to show their slobbering tongues. Boyd bent double. ‘As I recall,’ he rasped, ‘last time you was strung up in a tree I didn’t spend as long navelgazin ‘fore I cut you down. Thought I’d have to preach the whole gospel to get you movin’.’ 

Raylan checked the ammunition: only a few rounds remained. ‘I don’t remember agreein' on a plan. If this is it, well, it kinda sucks.’ Smoke stung his eyes and he turned to see flames beginning to lick up the base of the barn door. ‘Shit. They’re smoking us out.’ Flames spreading as the dogs screamed. 

Boyd braced himself and coughed while Raylan ran up and down the barn letting the dogs loose from their cages. The animals threw themselves from one spot to the next, wildly afraid of the fire and the two men despite Raylan’s soothing. Clouds of black smoke roiled off the roof while flames cracked the air with heat. Boyd straightened; he held something in his hand as he pointed. ‘Truck’s parked that way.’ They looked at each other and Raylan nodded and readied his gun hand. 

Together they kicked the sheet metal and it buckled with a slew of sparks, collapsing sideways with a creaking bellow. Dogs streamed through the gap and went baying into the night. Men yelled. Raylan extended his arm and fired a blind shot, then leapt the ring of fire to freedom. He and Boyd sprinting again, this time shepherded by a stream of maddened dogs. There were shouts behind, and towards them Boyd lobbed a flaming can of paint primer: a moment, then a orange rip of light and sound and accompanying screams. 

The keys were by some miracle in the ignition. Raylan leant over one door to cover Boyd as he crouched over the wheel and started the engine. He pulled a stray dog with a blue collar into the cab by the scruff of its neck as he himself leapt in, a few more already herded into the truck-bed; they set to clamouring as Boyd hit the gas. The truck slammed through a wooden barrier and careened onto the road, Boyd clutching the wheel like a lifebelt with both hands as specks of white appeared in the headlights and fluttered onto the disappearing path. 

They were home free and yet there was pain, somewhere. Raylan felt his stomach. Came away red-handed with a grunt, surprise spreading along with the blood on his shirt. ‘Shit,’ he breathed.

‘Raylan?’ Boyd was saying; his voice sounded stupid and hoarse but Raylan was too tired to tell him even while his pulse pumped wildly in his head. Snow or sight-loss flecking his vision he could not tell; he held his stomach and bled. Boyd’s hand pressed with desperate pressure over his while the flurries of new snow came down in swirling eddies. 

In the backseat, the dog howled. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading :)


	13. Chapter 13

 

> _I’m going to guess that the scar on your cheek was put there by a horse._  
>  _  
> _ _Yes mam. It was my own fault._  
>  _  
> _ _She watched him, not unkindly. She smiled. Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?_
> 
> **Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses**

 

* * *

 

It was the first snowfall of the winter, and it was a heavy one. The road swallowed up so fast by white flakes that Boyd was afraid to drive any faster, even while Raylan lolled half-conscious beside him. Blood leaking through his hands. Boyd bit his lip and peered past the swiping windscreen wipers, thinking it poor luck to escape one lynching only to freeze to death lost in a snowstorm. Raylan’s eyes fluttered.

‘Hold on,’ croaked Boyd, to himself or Raylan he did not know. No hiding they were utterly lost. One of the dogs in the truck-bed set to barking, frantic, and then it was free and running up the road with the snow lashing against its back. Boyd kept the headlights on it and followed, it clearly obeying some atavistic notion — or perhaps just striking out on its own rather than going down with them. He gripped Raylan’s hand to the wound; when he looked back to the road there was a light ahead, upward, and as he looked around he thought he recognised the rise of the land and the house ahead but could not place it. 

‘Look Raylan,’ he said, ‘Deliverance.’ The dog leading the way. 

They pulled up in a yard, lights beckoning from a house porch and barn and Boyd realised with a surprised jolt where they were. He ran to the house and hammered on the door, then ran back to half-carry Raylan from the truck. They stood shivering while someone unbolted the door. ‘Please,’ said Boyd to the swarthy man in the doorway holding a shotgun half-cocked in their direction. ‘Help.’ The dogs milled about the yard barking, answered by distant howls from the barn.

Then there was another man and this one he recognised -- the vineyard owner, Arturo, from months before -- and they took Raylan from him and lifted him into the house while he stood on the doorstep, quaking in his bloodstained shirt. An old woman appeared in the hallway and began to direct the men in rapid Spanish. She pointed to Boyd, then at the dogs; he went to the yard and gathered them up one by one and took them into the barn. Two other dogs already there and half-mad with excitement. When he went back to the porch there was a boy in pyjamas standing at the doorway looking in, mouth agape. ‘¿Qué pasa?’ he called into the men and the old woman, then saw Boyd with widening eyes. ‘What happened to you?’ 

The old woman came and shooed him away. ‘¡Vete a casa!’ The boy reluctant but dashed back into the snow, back home. Boyd swayed. The boy familiar and gone. A high pitch swarmed in his ears and his throat tightened; he stepped to steady his balance and nearly fell with dizziness. When he opened his eyes _she_ was emerging from the snow with rifle balanced at her shoulder, calling up ‘Raúl! We got visitors?’ past the empty idling truck. She saw him and halted. Ava once again aiming a gun at him just like the good old days. 

The old woman stepped through the snow and reached to lower the gun, took Ava up into the house by the hand. Cold leaving Boyd shaking in his boots — this surely fever, or brain damage setting in from the hanging. Deprived of oxygen and now imagining rescue and his old fiancé, in reality frozen to death at some roadside with Raylan bled out beside him. When Ava reappeared at the doorway, her face tight with mistrust, he tried to speak but could barely make himself heard. ‘Is he -?’

Ava impassive and hard edged. ‘Don’t leave him to freeze out there,’ called Arturo. ‘Bring him in, Layla.’ She stepped aside to let him pass and he felt a wave of nausea flood his throat; he caught himself on the doorframe and tried to breathe deeply but the air wouldn’t come. Felt himself hit the floor and as he let cold unconsciousness claim him heard footsteps and the boy crying, ‘Mom! Mom, help him! Do something.’ Young boy’s hands clutching his shirt trying to shake him back to life. Flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones. 

 

* * *

 

When he awoke he was alone. Spread out on a couch, naked to the waist with a blanket draped over him. Boyd lifted a hand to feel his throat, saw bandages circling his forearms from wrist to barbed wire ink. Burns he had not even felt at the time now salved and wrapped. He got up and moved with the blanket draped across his shoulders like a serape to the mirror on the wall and looked at his exposed body. The noose had left a vicious abrasion welted onto the skin of his throat and it stood out bright and ugly like a burned brand — but most horrifying were his eyes. Whites all but fully red. He looked cast straight from hell, hair wild and sweat-rung. It bothered him, having his shirt removed by strangers to judge the tattoos on his shoulder and chest and yet they had bandaged him and let him into their home. 

Voices sounded from the next room. He pulled the blanket tighter around him and moved barefoot down the hallway, paused at the kitchen door. Arturo sat cradling a drink watching the other man wash his bloodied hands at the sink. The old woman wiped her hands on her apron like a butcher, beckoned to Boyd as she saw him. He entered. Raylan lay on the kitchen table, looking awfully pale and white under the lightbulb’s harsh glow but Boyd felt a pulse as he took the other man’s slack hand. 

‘You are very lucky,’ said the man at the sink. ‘Lucky you found us in the snow. Lucky I happen to be a doctor. The bullet passed through muscle from behind without puncturing the peritoneum, but if you left him much longer he could have bled out. He’s going to be alright.’

Boyd wiped the sweat standing out on Raylan’s forehead, nodded. The old woman asked him something he didn’t understand. Arturo said, ‘She asked if you shot him. If you did that to yourself,’ gesturing to the rope-mark on Boyd’s neck with blank challenge. Boyd touched the skin, shook his head. Ava was nowhere to be seen; he wondered what she had told them, if anything. 

Below him Raylan stirred, showing the whites of his eyes through half-open lids. ‘Boyd?’ he whispered, reaching out a blind hand and felt Boyd’s bare ribs. ‘Why’re you naked?’

Boyd chuckled, rasped: ‘If you stayed that silent in a hospital they’d pull the plug on you. Had me worried.’ 

‘You sound weird,’ said Raylan and breathed a deep sigh, head lolling back as he fell back asleep. The old woman adjusted his hands across his breast, and nodded in satisfaction to the room. ‘Voy a ir a la cama,’ she said, then pointed to Boyd. ‘Él tiene que tomar un baño. Hay agua caliente.’ Raúl kissed her on the cheek and she shuffled away, leaving the men alone. 

Arturo looked at Boyd. ‘I remember you, three-fingers. You can explain tomorrow your situation; why you arrive in the middle of the night with a shot man and our missing dog. Why Layla won’t go near you. But for now, I will run you a bath.’ He got up and left. They waited in silence, then Raúl led Boyd down the hall to the sound of running water. 

The bathroom was covered floor to wall with patterned floral tiles. Arturo leant over the bath, swilling the water with his sleeves rolled up; Raúl touched the small of his back and he turned off the tap. ‘Leave the door open a little,’ said Raúl. ‘If you feel like you are going to pass out again, just call.’ 

The water hot but not too hot, Boyd settled slowly into the tub with his bandaged arms kept clear. Aches and pains of the night warming and dissipating in the water. Lightheaded, he leaned back and watched the steam rise and creep towards the crack in the open door. Raylan was going to live. 

He sat like this for what felt like an age, barely a thought crossing his mind. The door creaked open and when he looked over there was Ava wrapped in a dressing gown with her arms crossed across her chest. She shut the door, tightlipped. If her aim was to drown him, it struck him he had not the strength to stop her. She stood silently looking down at him in his nakedness, defenceless in the tepid water and finally asked flatly: ‘What are you doin’ here. And I don’t believe it’s coincidence; I know you wouldn’t neither.’

‘The Almighty's ineffable plan then,’ said Boyd. ‘It was not my intent for this to happen. I didn’t know — Raylan, he told me you were dead. And I believed.’

‘So you expect me to think this is some kind of cosmic justice, bringin’ you here to torment me in my days of peace?’

‘Ava,’ he said, and a shudder crossed her face. Something upset and distraught. ‘Ava. I swear to it. Snow so bad we had no way of knowin’ where we were at all last night. And before…that was unexpected to say the least. Thought I was seeing the dead.’

Ava sat down heavily on the toilet and covered her face. There was a domestic familiarity in the scene that tugged at Boyd’s chest: they had shared this before, nakedness and hurt and time spent together in the bathroom. He sluiced water over his bruised torso as she sat there, soaped his face and hair and leaned forward to dunk his head under. When he resurfaced the water was scummed with ash and pinkish blood and she was watching him. Taking in his new scars along with the old. She reached into her shirt and felt the point where Dickie’s bullet had struck her breast, white and puckered like the one above his heart. 

‘Too bad he got hit lower down,’ she said, meaning Raylan. ‘We could have all have matchin’ bullet-holes.’ 

‘He’s got enough as it is,’ said Boyd. Conscious of the mark where she had shot him. ‘Do you think it better, the lie he told? I see now he was tryin’ to act in kindness towards you.’

‘I don’t know.’ She pushed her long hair back behind her ear and laughed, mouth a bitter-drawn line. ‘Not like I had a say in what he aimed to do anyway. Thought that was it for me, and I was reconciled to it.’ 

‘But instead he was merciful.’

‘To us both.’ 

‘Aah. That is the truth. Leaving us free to meet again, me with my life and you with your freedom.’ _And your son_ , he wanted to say but he didn’t dare acknowledge the boy. ‘Funny, I found it easier forgivin’ you, Ava, when I thought you were dead.’

She rose and they looked at each other for a good long moment, intimate and yet totally divorced by the distance of twelve years and wound in his shoulder. ‘I won’t lie and say it’s good to see you, Boyd,’ she said. ‘I’m all done with feelin’ afraid. Afraid of you; afraid of Raylan; of the two of you leadin’ the Feds to my doorstep inadvertently or not. But I’m glad you’re didn’t die in prison. Even if it means that you’re goin’ do what you’re goin’ to do.’

‘And what may that be?’

Ava paused at the door and shrugged. ‘I’m tired of exhaustin’ myself tryin’ to figure that out.’ 

She slipped out. Boyd heard a man’s noise of surprise, and Ava saying, ‘Help him out, would you?’ Raúl appeared, looking between the doorway where Ava had been and Boyd still naked in the tub with clear surprise and suspicion. Boyd tried to rise from the water but his strength was sapped and it took Raúl’s help and a beating to his pride to step out of the bath, deliberate and slow like an old man. The towel Raúl handed him was warm and coarse. ‘Muy obligado,’ he murmured, and sank to the floor to dry himself.

When he emerged dressed in an old pair of corduroys and an overlarge flannel shirt tucked in and buttoned at the wrists he felt somewhat diminished, and bone-achingly tired. Ava was sitting in the kitchen, watching the rise and fall of Raylan’s chest under the blanket covering him like a corpse at a wake. Boyd crossed to the dresser and pulled out a pair of kitchen scissors, held them out to Ava with silent question. She took them and he sat. 

‘I ain’t done this in some time,’ she said soft and low, taking up a handful of Boyd’s hair and beginning to trim. Black and grey hair falling in bristles to the kitchen floor. They were very close; she could plunge the blades into his neck at any minute, but instead she chose to shear his hair while he half-dozed to the snip of the scissors. When finished she spiked his wet hair up with her fingers and stepped around to inspect her handiwork.

‘Now _that_ ,’ she said, ‘is Boyd Crowder.’

 

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

 

> _ "Next morning I awoke, looked out the window and nearly died of fright. My screams brought Atticus from his bathroom half-shaven. _
> 
> _ "The world's endin', Atticus! Please do something -!" I dragged him to the window and pointed.  _
> 
> _ "No it's not," he said. "It's snowing." _
> 
> ** Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird **

 

* * *

 

With the weather continuing cold and snow-laden the house on the vineyard mountainside was soon covered in thick snowy drifts. Gusts of wind blew flurries across the porch and upwards to dance in icy particles against the windowpanes, to gather thick on the shingled roof and once-bare yard. Dripping water arrested in motion as pointed icicles. Meanwhile the occupants inside the house watched and waited for reprieve, looking out at the surrounding white that signalled one thing: they were stuck with each other until the storm passed.

There was only one fireplace and it was here that the rightful occupants gathered. Arturo sat in a cracked armchair like a dignitary, the old woman that was Raúl’s mother knitting at his elbow. Raúl propped up on the floor by the fire with the three dogs lying aside. They had moved Raylan to the sofa where he dozed fitfully, face sweaty and drawn - an odd interloper annexing the familial furniture. For two days Boyd moved uneasily around the house and watched the flat sky for signs of abatement, but was drawn back to the living room time and again. For warmth, and to see Raylan. 

Of Ava there was no sign. 

He supposed she and the boy were in the small house across the way. From his position in the driveway he could see their kitchen light gleaming above him to the left, but he did not pause shovelling long enough to entertain the fancy of Ava standing there to return his gaze. The shovel was heavy and it was hard to maintain good grip with his crippled hand yet he had succeeded in clearing a good section of the yard and driveway since the morning. Bram nosed at the upturned snow, snuffling and pensive until his ears pricked up: twin signals to the opening and closing of a door nearby. 

Boyd kept his head down and his back bent. Behind him a crunch of footsteps and the dog left his side and didn’t return. It had to be the boy. Boyd ignored the activity behind him, focusing instead on the sink and shove of the spade. 

They continued their respective tasks in amicable silence, until: ‘You got a carrot?’ Boyd turned to see a rough-edged snow man constructed in the yard, the boy shaping the body with his gloved hands. 

‘Afraid not, nor do I carry coal in my pockets,’ said Boyd. ‘I ain’t Saint Nick.'

‘Huh. Figures,’ said the boy, rubbing his flushed face with his parka sleeve. He looked up at the snowman, then at the big house. ‘How’s your friend doing?’ he asked as if the question hadn’t been pressed up inside him for two whole days. 

‘He’ll live,’ Boyd said. Words tight in his mouth looking at the boy’s face, looking for sign of his daddy, his brother, his own dear mother dead forty odd years. ‘He’s got a fever but once that passes he’ll be right as rain.’ He was looking but all he could see was an unformed boy with Ava’s narrow nose and long mouth. 

‘Maybe I can bring him some snow to cool down? I need to get a carrot anyway,’ said the boy guilelessly, as if the snowman’s lack of nose was not part of an elaborate plot to gain entrance to the big house. ‘Does he still have a bullet in him?’

‘You should ask Mr. Hernandez as to its whereabouts, he removed it.’ Boyd stuck the shovel in the snowbank. ‘Ain’t a half-bad idea, bringin' in some snow. Raylan’s a Florida man so he don’t see this all that often,’ he said, scooping up a handful and looking at the boy. ‘No harm paying him a visit.’

The boy grinned in triumph and together they headed into the house.

‘Jesus, that’s nice,’ said Raylan when Boyd put a flannel packed with fresh snow to his forehead. He lay on the couch entangled in a sheet, sweat standing out on his collarbone and face and Boyd and the boy stood over him like penitents at a votive site. Snow cupped in the boy’s hands. 

‘Look,’ said the boy, watching Raylan’s face. ‘We brought you some since you can’t go outside to see it. It’s real deep.’ He grinned as Raylan scooped some up with a finger.

‘Piss-free?’ Raylan didn’t wait for an answer before he popped the melting snow into his mouth. ‘Ahh.’ An animal heat radiated from his feverish body and his strength seemed sapped even from such small exertion; Boyd felt it only charitable to lean in when Raylan weakly beckoned him closer with a raised hand — and leapt back with a curse as Raylan’s slipped ice water down his collar.

‘Dammit,’ he cried, clawing at the sodden nape of his neck. ‘Raylan you utter son of a bitch.’ 

Raylan acknowledged the boy’s laugh with a tired smile and lay back into the sofa, creased with brief joy and constant pain. The boy’s eyes darted down to where Raylan’s hand clutched his side, and in the momentary respite tested his daring. ‘Can I see it?’

‘S’cuse me?’ 

‘Where the bullet went it, can I see it?’

Raylan stretched and looked to where Boyd like he needed his permission but Boyd was sat with his back to the fire, face backlit and cavernous. He made no move as Raylan achingly peeled back the swatch of bandage taped across his hip. The boy leaned in.  There was a stretch of silence while the boy furrowed his brow like a man cheated at cards. ‘I thought it’d be bigger.’

Raylan craned his neck and grunted. ‘Feels plenty big from where I’m sitting,’ he said. 

The boy’s mouth opened to ask another question — maybe about the pain or some other intent matter to aid his imaginings of what beings shot with a real bullet was like — when a cough from the doorway stopped him short. ‘Honey?’ said the woman’s voice and the boy turned followed half a beat by Boyd who kicked himself for falling sway to better memories as he did so, for there was Ava, her arms folded and definitely addressing her son. ‘What’ch you think you’re doin’ with your nose half in the poor man’s side? And you,’ she said, addressing Raylan, ‘Try not to upset all of Raúl’s hard work stickin’ your fingers in places that haven’t healed.’ 

Even though Boyd had told Raylan of their situation when the two had been alone, it seemed Raylan had been half-attentive due to either pain or unconsciousness for he made a half-choked noise of surprise as he looked to the doorway. ‘Uh, yes ma’am,’ he said and folded the white gauze back over the round red hole sunk deep into his flesh. The boy watched this, then stood up with grave readiness to join his mother. 

‘That snowman in the yard looks awful lonely without a face,’ Ava said, and she held a vegetable out with a crooked smile to her son like a long-hidden prize. ‘I got you a carrot. You want to finish him together? I’ll be out in a minute.’

The boy’s face lit up. ‘Yeah! I was going to, then I - it’s perfect.’ He took the carrot and left the room with one last glance at the men, guilt absolved by her mercy. Ava smoothed the fur of his coat as he passed but her smile died as the front door clicked shut. 

She said with stiff professionalism to the room at large, ‘I don’t want you talkin’ to him. Neither of you.’ 

Boyd’s head was bowed, looking at his hands cradled like dead things in his lap as if he hadn’t heard. But his voice came low, saying, ‘That I can understand.’ 

Raylan tried to sit up and failed. ‘Hello, Ava.’ 

‘You heard me?’

‘Yes: no going near your son,’ he said. It was the first time any of them had said the word aloud and the acknowledgement hung heavy in the air, choking as firedamp and just as explosive. The ripples of it spread out and sank into Boyd’s gut. Raylan groaned, and muttered almost under his breath, ‘Now, would you let me sleep?’

Ava’s thin eyebrow’s arched in affront. ‘Don’t you dismiss what I got to say like that, Raylan Givens. I mean it.’

‘You heard her,’ said Boyd. 

Raylan said, ‘But she’s not real,’ his eyes red and glassy as he looked at Boyd with such certainty that a chill ran up his spine despite the fire at his back.

‘Beg pardon?’ 

‘Ava ain’t here, want to know how I figure that?’ said Raylan, his voice dry as sand. ‘Cause Arlo is standing behind you, mouthin’ off and him long dead.’ He raised a hand and pointed to the corner, Boyd and Ava looking and nothing there to see, nothing save an old chifforobe and a framed picture of a black and white street. ‘He never would shut up.’ 

The unease in Boyd’s gut tightened. He got to his feet and felt Raylan’s forehead with the back of his hand, the man’s skin griddle-hot and damp. ‘You’re burnin’ up,’ he said. ‘That ain’t but a figment of yo’ daddy, Raylan. Piss and vinegar but no flesh to substantiate a man.’

Ava took a half step into the room and regarded Raylan’s limp form. ‘He don’t look good.’ Her fingers tapped out an offbeat on her clutched elbows. ‘If you remember, Arlo saw Helen at the end.’

‘He ain’t dyin,’ Boyd stated.

‘Might be in the blood…’ said Ava. ‘You seen him ‘fore this? He’s older; you don’t know how he’s been livin’. None of them Givens men lived long enough to tell, save Arlo.’ 

‘He’s running a temperature of one-oh-four, not losin’ his damn mind,’ said Boyd, tugging his gaze from Raylan’s half-opened eyes to her face. ‘Please, Ava. I got to get him to a hospital. It's been too long as it is.’ 

She had her shoulders bunched up as if from cold, arms folded. ‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘I’ll get the others to finish the drive so y’all can be on your way. At long last.’ Paused at the door to look at him crouched by Raylan’s side gripping the other man’s arm as if to ground him to reality. ‘And stop callin’ me that.’

‘What?’

‘By my name,’ said Ava, and left the room.

 

* * *

 

The small creature of discontent that had been nestled in her gut finally loosed its gnawing hold as she watched the truck recede into the blank distance of the road beyond: sense of unease lifting, but not gone. Never to be gone now reawakened. She tightened her grip on the boy’s shoulder as they stood side by side with the men, the old woman already headed back indoors laboriously on her two sticks. 

A frown creased her son’s face, making him seem old and weatherworn in his many layers. ‘Is he going to die?’ he said, and she wished she could tell him what he wanted to hear. 

‘I don’t know,’ she said instead. ‘But he’s tough. A fever ain’t the thing that puts that kind of man in the ground.’ The thought of Raylan fading away in a hospital bed like a genteel consumptive was too ridiculous to pay heed; a bullet or nothing at all would kill him. But then again, she had thought the same for Boyd. 

And oft for herself. 

 

* * *

 

It was a short but treacherous drive to the medical centre. When Boyd halted the truck with a skid in the icy lot and half-carried Raylan inside, they took one look and ferried him onto an ambulance headed north. Boyd rode in the back, answered what questions he could and stayed silent the rest of the hour-long journey. The hospital was busy with the hum of doctors and tannoy chatter, and no one seemed very interested in the man in the blood-stained shirt and scarf that had come in with the fever-wrung gunshot victim. Boyd waited. Looked at his wristwatch and tried to figure out how long it would take local P.D. to catch the new patient on file.

He remained in the corridor thoroughfare for three hours before they came with handcuffs to take him away.

 

* * *

 

They took him to a nondescript room in a nondescript building, where they cuffed him to the table and did their best to bore him to death. ‘Mr. Crowder,’ said the female marshal, giving him a hardened glare from where she sat, ‘It is in your best interests to share what you know about how Mr. Givens sustained his injury.’

Boyd folded his hands and shrugged. ‘Why don’t we all take a little school outing, ask him ourselves?’ Ordinarily this was the sort of routine that he would enjoy or at least tolerate, but he couldn’t help the annoyance creeping into his tone as he imagined Raylan waking up in that damn hospital bed alone. ‘If I’d of shot the man, why in God’s name would I make sure he _don’t_ end up dead by bringin’ him to a hospital?’

Marshal #2 sighed and put his papers on the desk. ‘We’re not accusing you of shooting Mr. Givens. We just want your version of events.’ 

‘You seem an enterprisin’ sort of people. I’m sure you got your fair share of hypotheses.’

‘Folks at the hospital said it was a professional that patched Mr. Givens up. So if there’s any other witnesses out there to testify to your version of events, now’s the time to mention it.’

Boyd allowed himself a small sharp grin. ‘Flattery’ll get you nowhere,’ he said. ‘Did my best to sew the old boy up but I never did get round to takin’ the Hippocratic Oath.’

‘Let me get this clear,’ said the man, with ill-humour. ‘You’re saying it was just you and Givens holed up in the middle of a blizzard, him with a gunshot wound? One that you, with minimal supplies and _that_ hand managed to patch up neat as a surgeon?’ Boyd shrugged modestly.

The lady marshal leaned back in her chair and addressed the ceiling. ‘You want to talk to him yet? I’m fair dying for a coffee.’ 

‘Oh, what the hell,’ came a voice from the speaker on the wall. ‘You know how I’ve missed this.’ The woman got up and turned on the large plasma screen mounted on the wall, and with a hiss it flickered on to reveal Ex Chief Deputy Art Mullen. ‘Howdy, Crowder,’ he said.

Boyd chuckled in surprise, and raised his shackled hands. ‘I do declare,’ he said, taking in the changes time had wrought to the natural gravity of the man's face. ‘I rather imagined you’d of retired by now Mr. Mullen. I like the beard though.’ 

‘And it does me good to see you in cuffs again,’ said Mullen, clearly enjoying himself a great deal. ‘Ah, this is more like a favour from these kind folks in Oregon, letting an old man have a word or two with an acquaintance. They were very helpful the other day when I called ‘em up about tracking down our mutual friend.’

‘I confess I’m hard-done to think as to how you could’ve known where Raylan was, or that he was in need of helpin’,’ said Boyd. 

Mullen took a sip from a mug sitting half out of frame. ‘Let me see. Out of the blue, Raylan sends me this picture,’ he said, holding up his phone. It was pixelated and dark on the screen but Boyd could make out some kind of selfie. ‘Here’s Raylan, taking the picture,’ said Mullen and pointed to Raylan’s badly-lit face, ‘and here in the background is Boyd Crowder, driving. I don’t know if you can see but the text? It says _Art. Send Help_.’ He put the phone away and looked deadpan into the camera. ‘I may be a simple sort of fellow but a plea for help along with a picture of recent convict Boyd Crowder leads me to assume that the bullet hole in my friend was put there by you.’

Boyd shook his head and laughed, and tried not to curse Raylan as a smart sonofabitch. ‘I must say, shackled as I am, that I can’t fully appreciate Raylan’s sense of humour in times of peril,’ he said, ‘but if I were to put myself in his shoes I’d say this was the fastest way to get your attention. What with your visceral feelings at seeing myself and Raylan in the same vicinity, he no doubt felt he could count on you to send back up. Even across state-lines.’

'That being, we still were too late to catch you in the act.' Mullen rubbed his beard and took on an expression of deep contemplation. ‘I mean it _does_ sound like Raylan -- but, why, oh why was he with you in the first place? On paid leave no less?’

‘Raylan does as he pleases,’ said Boyd. He could feel a dehydration headache building in the top of his head. ‘Mr. Mullen, would you and your marshal friends here quit acting like I’m the one who shot him? I know you ain’t as boneheaded as to ignore the whole chess board.’

‘Hmm. Could you be referrin’ to the other local crimes that just scream _Boyd Crowder_ involving some minor explosions and a very large barn fire? Oh, and a gaggle of white supremacists lest we forget that crucial detail.’

‘Now you’re gettin’ there. But may I say, it was Raylan and I fallin’ afoul of said white supremacists that led to other events.’

‘Funny,’ said the male marshal, ‘When we talked to them they said you two showed up, burned down their barn and stole their dogs.’

‘Well, knock me down. You’ve cracked the dog-smuggling ring run by myself and the man who put me in prison for twelve years,’ said Boyd, spreading his palms in surrender. ‘I don’t want to question your investigative practice, but could it be those men were lyin’?’

The woman marshal leant forwards and flipped open her laptop. ‘Oh, we know they are,’ she said, and spun the screen around to face Boyd. As he watched, a phone recording began to play: a crowd of men’s backs, flame-lit, the cameraman yelling something as the group held their torches. It was a reverse of his view from the night, a parody of a lynching. 

If he squinted he could see his own white shirt at the front of the gathering but the angle shifted and it was men’s backs again - yet he could hear the timbre of his own voice rising and falling in the background, words indecipherable but undeniably his. Flames took hold of a man’s loose shirttail in the righthand side of the screen and the man howled; as the frame spun again Boyd saw the blurred shape of Raylan Givens pushing through the crowd. Hard to see through the chaos and sudden dutch tilt to the screen but he thought he saw his own feet kicking in the air as the crowd scattered. The phone hit the ground. Gunshots, yelling, then silence as the screen went black.

There was a moment of silence as the marshals watched him. He tipped his head down and smiled humourlessly into his scarf, said, ‘I didn’t realise you could live-stream lynchings now, that what the nation’s come to since I been locked up?’ 

‘You know, the fella up there giving a speech at a Neo-Nazi rally kind of sounds like him, doesn’t it?’ said the woman to her colleague. He nodded, compounding her point, so pleased to look pointedly at Boyd’s finger tattoos like they spelled out his guilt. ‘Mr. Crowder, do you want to explain what part you played in all of this?’

Boyd sighed. ‘I believe you’d call it the principal role,’ he said, pulling away the woollen scarf to reveal the reddened noose mark separating his throat like a knife wound. The marshals stared at his bared neck, the point they had been circling suddenly a pinprick in the case as the new scenario opened before their eyes. As they gaped the atmosphere stretched into a sticky slice of awkward silence.

Mullen let out a long whistle. ‘Ohh blow me,’ he said, tone mellow but expression unreadable. ‘It’s a kick in the balls, but it seems here that for once in his chequered life Crowder can’t be pinned with _that_ particular crime.’ 

‘Art!’ called a voice offscreen, a woman’s, offended. ‘Language!’

‘Sorry hon,’ said Mullen to his wife, ‘It’s just these nitwits here have gone and arrested the victim of a crime as a suspect for his own lynching. Don’t know where they got that idea from.’

A blurry figure appeared in the background behind him, which at closer examination was not an office but in fact a wood panelled kitchen. There was a clatter of dishes and Mullen’s wife said, ‘Did I hear you say Crowder? You’re talking to that fellow Boyd Crowder?’

The marshals smirked as Mullen rolled his eyes. ‘Yes dear, I’m still on that important call I said I was takin’,’ he said over his shoulder, exasperation doing a bad job of masking real fondness.

‘Tell him I pray for him,’ called Mullen’s wife, muffled but Boyd heard her nonetheless.

Mullen half-turned in his chair to hide his reddening face. ‘Leslie, I’m retired but I like to think I have a shred of professionalism. So no, I will not tell a career criminal that my wife is having chats with Jesus about him.’

Boyd called back, ‘You’re very kind, Mrs Mullen!’ before Art could figure out how to mute him, charming and calm as if she had paid him a compliment on his casserole at a church fair.

‘The two of you can get to planning your wedding _after_  I’ve died of apoplexy,’ said Mullen, turning the laptop away from his wife as she laughed like a schoolgirl. ‘Someone take the victim’s statement and let’s never talk about this again. God damn, Raylan,’ he said and a soberness crept into his face. ‘I can’t wait to give him shit about this. Asshole better not die on me.’ 

‘Raylan’ll have plenty more opportunities to piss you off. That boy ain’t going nowhere,’ said Boyd and it only struck him later how wrong he could be.‘ _Now_ , would someone please liberate me from these goddamn handcuffs.’

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

 

 

> _ Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content. _
> 
> ** Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl **

 

 

* * *

 

 He had not died from bullet nor fever but he would be damned if a fucking domestic flight was going to be his end.

‘Oh shit,’ said Raylan as the plane bounced, listed, corrected, and then bounced again on the runway tarmac. Then just before they ran out of runway and plummeted through the barrier to the freeway beyond, the ground suddenly fell away behind them and they were off. He groaned. Taking a bullet was nothing new in his line of work, but it struck him that he had never before been shot, broken out of hospital and gotten on a flight to Florida in such rapid order. He clutched his side as the mounting pressure wreaked havoc with his wound and already-pounding head. 

‘First time?’ inquired the doughy businessman beside him. The sympathy falling somewhat flat within his condescending tone. Raylan felt the morphine still swimming in his system; his reply came slower than normal. ‘It ain’t. Just gives me…stomach problems is all.’ 

With this understatement, he resumed his pointed _don’t-talk-to-me_ expression and subtly felt the gauze packed against the waistband of his stolen sweatpants for signs of blood. He knew he looked a state: If he had been a TSA agent he would have taken one look at his ill-fitting pants, ash-blacked boots and the chic combo of jacket and barely concealed hospital gown trim and shipped him back from whence he came. Then again, perhaps security viewed him merely as a problem returning to its rightful state. 

‘What’s bringing you to Miami, mister?’ came the businessman’s insinuating drawl. Ignoring Raylan’s body language to launch into conversation. 

‘Promises I said I’d keep.’ Raylan said with a barely contained sigh of annoyance. ‘For some reason I swore on pain of death that I’d attend my ex-wife’s fiftieth.’ The reason being Willa, of course, how her face had lit up with joy at his final acquiescence. And he it wasn’t like he got out to a lot of parties these days: it would be fun, they said. He agreed to go, as long as it wasn’t invitation born out of pity and as long as Winona stopped trying to set him up with another one of her beautiful, interesting and well-qualified lady friends — how Willa had laughed at that! And now, him forever the absent partner and father, in danger of rocking the careful balance he had established with his family thanks to a bunch of Neo-Nazis and Boyd Crowder’s recent career as a pet detective.

‘She got you on a tight leash still,’ said businessman. ‘Might want to get rid of that blood you got on your jacket before seein’ her, wives are mighty particular that way.’ He laughed at his own words as if they were funny. 

‘It isn’t mine,’ said Raylan.

‘What, the blood or the jacket?’ 

‘Neither,’ Raylan said and the businessman stopped laughing. Raylan flipped up the jacket’s stiff collar and hoped that out of all the things Boyd and he had done to each other over the years the theft of Boyd’s winter coat and shoes could be forgiven. 

It had been a necessity. He had awoken in the hospital, semi naked and in pain, and there had been Boyd slouched in the bedside chair fast asleep, neck craned uncomfortably on his shoulder like he had been there all night. Hollow circles under his eyes and the rope-mark peaking from his shirt. Strangely vulnerable looking. His hair sticking up wildly as in times past. How, he wondered even now, had Boyd had time to get a haircut while Raylan was bleeding to death? 

The lancing pain in his side had made unlacing Boyd’s shoes a hard task, but Raylan considered himself nothing if not tenacious as he left the man barefoot at his vigil to sneak past the nurses’ station and down to the taxi rank outside. If Boyd was pissed at him, well, that was just the normal swing of things. 

Should he have left a note? ‘I’m not a fuckin’ schoolgirl,’ said Raylan aloud, and his neighbour cast him a concerned look. He was not going to start leaving notes to Boyd Crowder every time he went about his business; _he_  hadn’t asked the man to sit there in that chair all night like a fretting mother. They didn’t owe each other anything: the last time he had seen Boyd in a hospital two people ended up dead, for Christ’s sake. Although he couldn’t help but feel a guilty pang for sneaking away like that without so much as a _farewell_ or a _fuck you_ or anything in between — but escaping like a criminal had been easy. 

He was in the man’s shoes, after all.

 

* * *

 

The snow only thickened as winter drew on, leaving Oakridge laden with the promise of a white Christmas.

Boyd thought that things would be different, going about his life with her face and the boy’s face stamped into his mind like a brain-death afterimage. Of all the deaths he had experienced ( Ava tearing apart his self-notion with just one crushing sentence, his followers strung up in nature’s abattoir, the blaze of Raylan’s bullet in his chest and the knowledge that he had been spared), this was the most staggering. 

On dry evenings he skulked outside the Episcopal church listening to the choir practicing — well, not skulked. It a free country, he in the right to sit by the gravestones and watch the spill of coloured light through the mullioned windows. _For unto us a child is born_ , indeed. It calmed him. Yet he never set foot inside the building. Didn’t feel right, not with the old feeling within him; the one that when young would have prompted him to lay a long line of fuse and watch Presley Carlton’s mailbox explode into so much shrapnel. But he wasn’t a boy anymore: he curbed the impulses that so often led to his ruin, kept his head down and tried not to feel anger at the thought of Raylan hightailing out of town. Even if he had left Boyd to foot the bill as well as stealing his only pair of shoes. 

A mercy then, the delivery of the stock for the bookstore to keep his hands and his mind busy. The thousands of books, some new some second hand but all needing to be catalogued and shelved. Divided into sections. He had worked the law library his last four years inside and the work was familiar, mindless - with fewer intrusions, fewer nervous inmates asking for his help with legal jargon. But interruptions regardless.

‘It looks how I thought it would,’ came a voice behind him and Boyd turned from where he was sorting books into great stacks on the floor to see Ava, stiffly framed in the doorway as if by poor stage direction. Soft strains of music playing tinnily from his phone atop a pile of school textbooks. He didn’t ask how she got in, just squatted back on his heels among the boxes and waited for her to explain.

‘You left the dog,’ she said, gesturing to the window and the street beyond. She had on a sweater and a rubbery raincoat, couldn’t possibly be cold but her arms were wrapped across her chest regardless. ‘It got me nervous, thinkin’ that you might just drop back in whenever with no warnin’ so I brought it here myself. It’s outside.’

Boyd felt something in his knee pop as he shifted his position. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he said. ‘But I appreciate it. Told the owners he was safe ’n sound but it didn’t feel right, goin’ back to get him.’ 

Ava nodded and he guessed it was easier for her to be in his space, able to leave, than having him there in her home. She asked, ‘How’s Raylan?’

‘Alive,’ said Boyd. ‘At least I presume he is, since he cut and run soon as they were done stitching him back together.’

‘Hasn’t changed, then.’

‘Not in that regard. Boy always knew how to leave folks in the lurch.’ He stayed still as she moved into the room, even though she was here of her own free will and unlikely to spook now.

Ava raised a hand and ran her fingers along the polished edge of one of the bookshelves, and when she spoke her gaze was far away. ‘Bowman brought home a puppy once. To make up for something — I can’t remember now, there were so many things — but he brung me this dumb yellow mutt just to show how sweet he could be,’ she said. The memory moved across her face as she talked, tightening the lines of her mouth. Boyd closed his eyes against the shade of his younger brother filling out the room. 

‘Think it lasted a week ‘fore Bowman kicked its head in. Didn’t even mean to, it was just so little and he was drunk. It was then that I found myself feelin’ glad that the baby died inside me, rather’n be born into that life,’ she said. Her calm tone made the words all the worse. 

Boyd knelt among the boxes like a penitent and thought of how he had loved his brother, how he had loved Ava, and Raylan — and yet they had been unable to escape the tangled threads of action and consequence that choked love until it was a sour, dead thing. Hollowed out by meanness and betrayal. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. She had shared stories like this one before, dredged them up and let them float like scum in a deep well but he had never gotten used to their individual awfulness. 

‘I ain’t thought of that for years,’ she said wonderingly. ‘And then it came to me, and I knew there was no one who could possibly understand it if I told them.’

‘I know,’ Boyd said. If this was his role, a painful tie to a painful past, he didn’t much care for it but he understood her need to talk of what had been done in Harlan with someone who knew full well what had happened there. He looked at his hands and said, lightly, ‘Bowman tried to kill me once.’ 

Sharpness flooded Ava’s voice. ‘What?’ 

‘He must’ve been sixteen, seventeen. I’d just graduated high school and told my daddy flat out that I wasn’t gon’ work for him. Bowman, he always felt things strongly, and I reckon he felt that I was bein’ an ungrateful son,’ said Boyd, feeling his mouth twist. ‘He was angrier than I ever saw him. Said our daddy loved me more and that I was spittin’ in the old man’s face by way of thanks, that I wasn’t better than the rest of them. We started fightin’, and Bowman was big even at that age. Near beat me to a pulp. I managed to get up and when I did he picked up a rock this size —’ he said with both fists bunched together, ‘and threw it at my head.’ 

‘Jesus,’ said Ava. ‘Bowman used to beat on anyone who said a word edgeways about his brother.’

Boyd let out a strained laugh. ‘I think the main point there bein’ Bowman liked to beat on just anyone. Rock hit me right in the chest, right here,’ he said, spreading a palm over the base of his sternum. ‘You ever been winded properly? Like you couldn’t get a breath in even if you tried. Bowman standing over me lookin’ scared, must of thought he’d caved in my ribs cause he got in his truck and headed for home leavin’ me gaspin’ on the ground like a fish.’ He crossed his legs and considered the patterned floorboards. ‘Looked mighty relieved when I showed up alive, my baby brother. We never talked of it again and I started at the mine the next week.’

He heard the clack of Ava’s flats as she stepped tentatively towards him. ‘He never said anything about that,’ she said. 

‘He never said anything about likin’ to beat on women either,’ said Boyd, and cursed himself for his hard tone. ‘Bowman didn’t talk about doin’, he just did. Probably didn’t bother him none. In truth I haven’t spared much thought for my kin in the adjoining years. Funny how much blood used to mean.’

When he looked up Ava was regarding him with an expression of old. No frown for once, a softening in her eyes. ‘It doesn’t mean nothing at all though,’ she said. ‘Kin.’ And then, as if it were an unrelated thought brought on by the stacks of books piled about, ‘I need to get something for my boy, for Christmas. He likes to read.’

Boyd felt his heart tighten in his chest. ‘Oh?’ he said, like it was just a professional query from any old customer. He achingly pulled himself upright and moved about the books, searching for the right stacks and wondering why she was doing this to him. Why she didn’t say more. ‘I got some that I think might do all right.’ 

Eventually he surfaced holding two books and held them out to her as if they were burning his palms. She took them, flipped one and opened the cover. ‘19th century poetry, really?’ she asked, raising an arch eyebrow. 

‘The other one’s an adventure novel,’ said Boyd with the need to justify himself. ‘I got the school-kids around here to fill out their favourite books and that’s up the top. Some boy and his dog goin’ on the run across the states, came out last year. For kids.’

Ava looked at the cover and let a small smile quirk the corners of her mouth. ‘I see. Looks good, just I can’t imagine you readin’ this at any age.’

Boyd frowned in mock consternation. ‘I read my fair share of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys over the summer of second grade,’ he pointed out. ‘Only moved onto Kierkegaard the following year.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Take them both. Don’t need to say anything ‘bout the Whitman, but I think he might like it.’

She said nothing to this, just weighed the books up in her hands and nodded. ‘Alright. Well, thanks.’ He watched the shadow tilting across the sharp bone of her cheek and wondered when she had known, when she had felt the life growing inside her and if it had been then that she decided to quit Harlan by any means possible. And if that made things better or worse. ‘How much do I owe you?’ asked Ava, oblivious to his train of thought.

‘Oh, we technically ain’t open for business yet — best you just take them.’

‘I don’t want to do that.’

‘Think of it as payment then, the price of Raylan’s life,’ said Boyd, holding up his hands to fend off her money. ‘I think it’d tickle him somewhat to find out his existence comes out less’n twenty dollars.’

‘I suppose it would,’ agreed Ava, clutching the books with a furrowed brow, looking past Boyd — no, _at_ Boyd: his hand. Question pressed behind her lips. ‘What…how did it happen?’ she eventually asked, seemingly dragging the words out despite herself. 

Boyd closed his open palm and regarded his hand as if a magician’s half-dollar might appear in his grip but there was only the scarring. ‘I forget it wasn’t always this way, sometimes,’ he said, crossing to one of the stuffed armchairs and sitting with his hands spread before him. ‘It looks worse than it is.’

‘It looks like someone hacked your fingers off with a blunt shiv,’ said Ava matter-of-factly. She didn’t move to sit beside him, but she did lean against a bookshelf and regard him with something that could have been sadness. 

‘Well in that case, it looks exactly as is.’ He tried for a laugh but she just frowned further until he swallowed, asked: ‘Do you remember Gretchen Swift?’ Her hand twitched upwards in an involuntarily compulsion to touch her hair — clearly she did. ‘’Bout six years back her brother Gunnar landed in the same block as me…say what you will about the man’s intelligence, but he proved adept at holdin’ a grudge.’

Ava grew silent and watchful as the weight of prison settled back into the draw of her shoulders, eyes fixed clear and hard on Boyd. He told it plain without any of his usual flourishes. ‘If you’ll believe me, wasn’t much trouble up til then. I kept my head down. But introducin’ a man like that into the ecosystem tipped the situation from manageable to outright madness — fool wanted to start some kind of war. I told my guys to keep out of it, let what was gon’ happen happen and so it did.’

He tried not to think of the violence of it, the hands holding him down, the true helplessness and screaming agony as they sawed up his hand like a particularly stubborn block of wood. Pinned to the floor as the blood ran towards his face. Howling. His own detached ring finger at eye level. ‘Only got the two before bein’ interrupted,’ he said holding up the remainders. ‘Did a bang-up job but they ran rather’n take credit for the artistry.  Now I’d of been happy leavin’ it at that but dear Gunnar had made it clear that he was goin’ to remove all my old ink by any means possible. So, soon as they let me outta infirmary I paid a visit to where he worked in the kitchen, put a hot skillet straight to my arm with him watchin’. No one’d believe that Gunnar didn’t follow through on his promise.’

Ava regarded his shoulder where the shirt covered the shiny scar and severed lines of ink and a dark expression crept onto her face. ‘You didn’t come up with that move by yourself.’ 

He saw from her grimace what she was thinking. ‘A lesson from even the most despicable character does not invalidate its inherent merit,’ he said. 'Albert Fekus was a cowardly, contemptible shitheel but his logic landed the man who laughed while cuttin’ me to pieces in the SHU. And his boys kept their distance: why, two of them came to Christ a few years later.’ 

‘That’s awful.’

Boyd leaned back, feeling his smile stretch a mite too sharp and savage. _‘Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’_

‘No, the rest of it,’ murmured Ava. 

He dropped the false humour. ‘Don’t have to tell you what it’s like to survive inside,’ said Boyd, without looking up to see the faint flush spreading on her cheeks. 

She gripped her elbows and said, very low, ‘I never could of lasted that long. Without goin’ mad or gettin’ kilt or worse. Barely sleepin’, havin’ to watch your back all the time, nobody close less they wanted something from you? It’s like goin' crazy.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you I never slept so well as I did locked up?’ Boyd asked. This a statement that made even the men inside look at him like he was well and truly mad. ‘Used to be havin’ the rhythms of life dictated unto me was a great indignity but this time round it proved inordinately freeing. Can’t worry about bein’ got if they’ve already got you; the worst has happened, and asides from Gunnar Swift takin’ his pound of flesh there ain’t much else to be done.’ 

She shook her head, short of incredulous. Her own history heavy in her voice. ‘I…it’s hard to imagine it could be like that.’

‘I realised I spent so much of my life tryin’ to control,’ he said, gripping the word in the air with both hands. ‘Was the struggle that consumed my world from dawn to dusk, shapin’ things accordin’ to my will — but you can control things, events: everything save what’s most important,’ he said. ‘And only upon giving up that control did I find something like _peace_.’

The word solidified as Ava stared at him, finally saying, ‘You really are back to believin’ in God,’ with wonder.

‘I didn’t set out to. You can blame that on Him.’

She straightened up, books held like a shield before her. ‘That’s something I never thought I’d see. All of this, actually,’ she said, gesturing around the room. ‘Never thought there was a _next_ for the likes of us, and yet…’

_‘When the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance,_ ’ said Boyd, and laughed up into the dark of the ceiling. ‘Yes indeed.’

 

* * *

 

A week after Christmas a postcard stamped with the Floridian palm tree arrived on Boyd’s doorstep. He spent a while puzzling over it while he drank his morning coffee, the picture a godawful neon city strip with _Greetings From Miami!_ emblazoned in nightmare typography. The writing on the back characteristically brief, three letters all Raylan saw fit to send him by way of apology: I O U. 

‘No shit,’ said Boyd, and tacked the card to his fridge where it sat in solitary ugliness. 

The man himself showed a month after. By this stage the bookstore was finally open to the public, the bakery capitalising on the frozen public’s need to escape the drifts of snow hardening into ice in the street. And there was Raylan, on his doorstep holding a shoebox under one arm and a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle special reserve in his free hand, leaning up against the intercom and shivering in his long coat.

He moved aside to let Boyd open the door, then followed him into the hall where he kicked the snow from his boots onto the mat. Boyd mounted the stairs. ‘Do you consider yourself candidate for rapture, Raylan?’ he asked over his shoulder. Raylan followed slowly, trudging with each step. ‘Just so I know, next time I wake up and you’ve vanished off the face of the earth.’

‘Happy New Year,’ drawled Raylan, pointedly refusing to acknowledge Boyd’s sarcasm as a greeting. He paused to catch his breath as Boyd led them into his apartment, it still clean and sparse as ever. Boyd shrugged off his jacket.

‘I’d of offered to help carry something,’ he said, ‘But you seem just as mobile as you were right after bein’ shot, so…’

Amusement lit Raylan’s eyes in a slow spread as he said, ‘You seem to be overcompensatin’ on the whole annoyed front there, Boyd. When I put a bullet in you you showed not a scrap of ill-will, yet God forbid I borrow your shoes in a moment of need?’

‘I’m sorry. Guess I’m overly tryin’ to reassert our diametric positions on the world’s stage,’ Boyd said and moved past him to the kitchen. ‘Last time confused me greatly y’see, playin’ the moral white hat to your dark one. Ain’t used to workin’ the opposite side.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Raylan mildly. Following.

‘White hat comment bringin’ back painful memories? Since it seems you’ve misplaced yours.’

‘You’re well out of date: that hat bit the dust the day you were arrested, I’ve been through, what, three since then? Last one didn’t stick.’ Raylan sat himself at the table as Boyd set about gathering mugs, pulled out half a fudge cake from the fridge. 

‘That what the bottle’s for? We can drink to the death of your poor fashion choices along with the image of a man still adherin’ to the principles of manifest destiny,’ said Boyd.

Raylan snorted. ‘You are close to nearin’ on insufferable. It ain’t for any of your stupid notions.’ He paused, tacked on as if an afterthought: ‘I was hopin’ we could drink to my unemployment.’

Boyd looked at Raylan then, all mockery gone from his face as he regarded his friend who was no longer an instrument of the U.S government. No a lawman, decked out to stop criminals with a tip of his hat. ‘Raylan,’ he said, unsure what to say. He wanted to put his hand on Raylan’s arm but thought the man might baulk. ‘So you decided.’

‘Hell, mandatory retirement was loomin’ around the corner next year anyway,’ said Raylan, rolling the words around as if he could convince himself of them better that way. ‘Circumstances of it is what pisses me off but that’s besides the point. I’m here, amn’t I?’ 

‘Indeed you are.’ Boyd sat. ‘Let’s break open that bourbon before you vanish into the ether.’ He tipped out the alcohol and slid Raylan a mug like a card dealer, passing on his own drink to hold up the bottle to eye level. ‘12 year bourbon?’ he said. ‘In that case I’ve been on reserve too, friend.’

‘’Cept we know who aged better,’ said Raylan into the rim of his mug. 

‘I’d like to think I’ve matured somewhat by my fifty-sixth year,’ Boyd said, dignified. The bourbon went down hot in his ears and throat, and he titled back on his chair to look watch Raylan drink. It made him feel old. Boyd had prison as an excuse for the lines on his face, the gaunt pull to his sockets and cheekbones, the streaks of grey — but Raylan still looked as good as he ever had. A bit more rangy, sharp edged and silver but _good_. ‘How about you, Raylan? Do I sense a mellowing in your nature or are you just poppin’ the good painkillers?’

Raylan stuck two fingers into his slice of fudge cake and scooped out a chunk shamelessly. ‘Last I looked I wasn’t a cheese,’ he said with a contemplative set to his face. ‘Sounds like you’re describin’ a cheddar at the dairy counter.’ 

And he had called _Boyd_ insufferable. Boyd drained his bourbon and poured another, giving the line the disdain it deserved. ‘Ava came by, before Christmas,’ he said; who else but Raylan would know just what that meant?

The web of crow’s feet around Raylan’s eyes crinkled as he frowned. ’Jesus.’

‘Do you ever remember bein’ at hers, after what happened? You were more far out than I realised at the time.’ 

‘I was shot in the side, not in my damn head,’ said Raylan, a twinge of disgust creasing his mouth. ‘Sure, the memory’s a bit burnt out at the edges but I know where I was. Who was there, Ava et all.’ He rubbed the back of his neck with his ringed hand. ‘Had some weird fuckin’ hallucinations though.’

‘Arlo,’ said Boyd.

‘Arlo,’ agreed Raylan. The ghost of his father seemed uncomfortable even in this room. ‘What did Ava want?’

‘Oh, she just dropped by…’ said Boyd, even though that was ridiculous. It had been ridiculous, an absurdity in the moment and beyond. ‘We talked about Bowman some.’

‘ _Bowman?’_ choked Raylan, as if Boyd’s brother had always been a clod of earth and accompanying lump of granite in Tway Cemetery, Harlan County; never a man above ground with a practiced throwing arm and fist like a hammer. ‘I’d of thought he’d be old news by now.’

Boyd leaned his forearms on the table, felt his new unhealed burns protest with a stab of pain. ‘Old news is all there is.’

He knew what Raylan was thinking of even before he opened his mouth. Those two words still ringing in the air between them, the greatest and most terrible news yet: fatherhood. Raylan said, ‘So you’re never goin’ to acknowledge to her that you know about — ’ and Boyd said, ‘ _Raylan.’_ It came out sounding so tired and final that Raylan dropped the subject with uncharacteristic grace.

They continued to drink elbow to elbow in silence until the room turned gloomy with oncoming night. Raylan stretched achingly, wide yawn signalling the end to their evening. Boyd put the mugs in the sink and as he got up Raylan seemed to remember the shoebox he had carried with him and held it out. ‘This is yours,’ he said. 

There were a pair of boots in the box, but they were new leather: not his shoes. ‘These ain’t mine,’ said Boyd. ‘If you’ve gone and lost them, just admit it.’

‘I was saddened somewhat to see that you buy your footwear at Walmart,’ said Raylan like he hadn’t heard. He moved into the next room, and Boyd followed holding the box. ‘These’ll last longer.’ 

His prideful bent wanted to argue, but then again he was wearing cheap black sports shoes already starting to wear away at the toes. Boyd said, ‘I can’t tell if this is a kindness or a cover-up.’

Raylan shrugged. ‘Think of it as both…as Willa _may_ have apprehended your jacket thinkin’ it was mine.’

‘You know what I used to do to people that stole from me?’ said Boyd darkly, pulling out a duvet to the mattress and transferring his own bedding to the couch. ‘Shouldn’t have expected any less from a Givens.’

Raylan stalled between the door and the bed as if stuck on an un-oiled track. ‘What’re you doin’?’ he asked, hesitating. For an investigative type he sure was acting pretty obtuse.

‘Come on son, where did you expect to sleep tonight? You don’t know the vicinity and you’re half-cut as is.’ Boyd unbuttoned his shirt and pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of flannels from the Goodwill down the street while Raylan pretended to struggle with the offer. 

‘Fine,’ he said, mulish. ‘But you take the bed.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Boyd. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’ He stretched out on the couch and pulled up the covers, ignoring Raylan’s sound of protest. ‘You’re the one with the bullet-hole. Take the mattress and we can sort out your more existential issues tomorrow, but as for now, just quit jawin’ and turn off the damn light.’ 

He lay with his back to Raylan and let the man shuffle around in the dark until there was a creak as the mattress sagged with his weight. The street was quiet outside, and in the silence he could hear the rise and fall of Raylan’s chest and it comforted him. How quickly he had become used to noise: the constant measured breaths of another man’s bodily existence spanning years in the dark of his cell. How void a room became without it at night. Raylan rolled over with a huff and Boyd closed his eyes, found himself drifting off to the slow rhythm of Raylan’s breathing, dry and constant and present in the space beyond. 

He slept.

  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We know Boyd already likes quoting Khalil Gibran, and well, Abraham Lincoln is an eminently quotable fellow. 
> 
> Comments appreciated!


	16. Chapter 16

  

 

> _The people in flight from the terror behind — strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever. _
> 
> ** John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath**

 

* * *

 

It was something that Raylan seemed to trust him more these days. Not blind trust, per say, but the kind of trust that let him sleep in the same room as Boyd without worrying about having his throat cut or worse. It was a thin-backed surprise to Boyd that the man was still there when he got up the next morning, a jolt to the stomach. Scene replayed in the following days like a spliced loop of film except the unexpectedness of it faded with each viewing, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t grateful for each one. It was some time since he’d been reminded of his own weakness. 

The next days behind the bookstore till brought back forty-year memories, a wilderness of classroom and sullen learning where Boyd watched Raylan across the row of desks because Boyd was perceptive even then: he knew then that Raylan Givens was bound for something. Once Boyd had come across a cottonmouth while out in the hollers by himself, no older than seven or eight, and despite the danger he had lain on his belly in the tall grass and watched the snake sun itself on a rock. Coiled and content and dangerous. Watching Raylan across the classroom had given him the same sweating feeling and strange unobserved delight as watching that snake, and even now he recognised the sensation from where he leant against his own business counter as a grown man. 

He didn’t think that he would ever be free of the many versions of Boyd Crowder buried under his skin, but he observed it would be better if his teenage self could refrain from resurfacing at the sight of Raylan propped up in one of the better armchairs with a book held at arm’s length squinting like Paul Newman in some western or other. 

To the casual onlooker Raylan was a fellow customer. He sat and ignored the middle-schoolers grouped around assignments and other frequenters of the table area, but each day after Boyd closed up shop the two of them went for long looping drives as of the mine-dark ages. They hadn’t talked much since the first night and Boyd didn’t want to ask Raylan what he thought he was doing, dropping into his life like Boyd could remind him of some old path. Raylan, directionless, felt like he had an oblique footing in Boyd’s life and the town of Oakridge. 

When Raylan took off a few weeks into this strange arrangement it seemed natural, expected. But he came back three days later and grinned as he took a bundle of notes from his pocket and pressed half into Boyd’s hand. ‘For rent,’ he said, and Boyd fiddled with the button on his left cuff so as give himself time to take in his meaning, that he aimed to stay. 

‘I take it you’ve been gainfully employed then?’ he said, peering up at Raylan where he sat in the cab of Boyd’s truck like the rightful owner. 

‘Got the idea from you actually, playin’ pet detective. Some woman willin’ to pay three hundred for the safe return of her cat, victim of a bad custody battle,’ said Raylan looking feline-smug himself. ‘Ex gave it up without too much of a fight.’ 

‘Huntin’ cats in place of people, is it?’ 

Raylan’s humour slipped down a couple of notches. ‘I don’t exactly have a whole lot of range in my skillset,’ he said. ‘I’m good at it.’

‘I abide in faith regardin’ the capability of the old dog and new tricks,’ said Boyd. The thought of Raylan wrestling a cat from an unwilling divorcee should have been comical but then again lesser men had been shot for less. 'Remind me again, what it is _I’m_ good at? As you so kindly put it.’

He wasn’t trying to make this a fight but Raylan looked ready to head in that direction. ‘Blowin’ shit up, among other things,’ he said after a dark pause, then tilted his head to look out the windshield at the shop as if the recent scorch-marks on the pavement had been a byproduct of a certain rocket-launcher.

‘So do you recommend I resharpen that tool in my arsenal?’ asked Boyd, stepping back to let Raylan down from the truck. ‘Since I’ve got more experience in that area than runnin’ a bookstore.’

He knew the truck door was hard to close on a good day but Raylan near dented the metal with excess force. ‘S’not what I’m sayin’.’

‘Then you appreciate that there’s more to life than huntin’ people with a badge. I’ll say no more on the matter; you can do what you want with your ample time,’ Boyd said to Raylan’s retreating back. Raylan stalked stiffly away but turned on his heel to toss Boyd his keys. Boyd caught them with his bad hand and said, ‘What I’m tryin’ to say, Raylan, is you should take backup next time in case things go bad. If you must stick to the same path then I reckon I know you well enough to follow.’ 

Raylan’s face implacable, made Boyd think of the stocky snake curled on a deep-holler rock. He had wanted to touch it to see if it would be warm with sun or steadily cold-blooded, and with Raylan there was the same curiosity even though it would be a mistake. But Raylan dropped his shoulders before Boyd could bring himself to put a hand on his arm, and when he spoke his voice was quiet. ‘I see. I’ll think on it.’

It seemed the interim years had not robbed them of their ability to piss each other off. 

 

* * *

 

‘I miss feeling my feet,’ said Raylan into his phone, looking out at the flat grey lake reflecting the flat grey sky above. By rights the cold was supposedly ebbing, but that only gave birth to sloughs of mud for him to cake his boots with as he undertook one of his many rambling walks. ‘Remind me what it’s like to see the sun?’

_‘I think you’re meant to say, “Gee, I sure miss my daughter,” before you say you miss Florida,’_ came Willa’s voice on the line. He laughed, watched Boyd skim a stone three-skips out into the lake and wondered at his own capability to dick around Oregon while his family pretended he was young enough to be going through a mid-life crisis. 

‘Miss you, kid, you know that. How’re the twins doin’?’

_‘Felix’s decided he’s a vegetarian since watching some documentary on the TV, and mom says it’s okay but she’s secretly mad Richard let him watch it because he had nightmares_ _for like a week. Louis is obsessed with deep-sea fish. So nothing new; they’re still weirdoes.’_

‘If you think you’re anything but, think again young lady.’ 

_‘Thanks Dad. You always know just what to say.’_ There’s a pause, then she said, _‘So, how’s your friend? Boyd?’_ Raylan was glad she couldn’t see his guilty start; his daughter’s perception remained more reminiscent of Winona than anything she inherited from him. 

‘Ah, he’s, uh, fine,’ he said. The wind took a bitter turn and he pulled his coat tighter around him. ‘It wasn’t his fault, if that’s what you’re askin’. That I got hurt.’

_‘I heard you and mom arguing at the party,’_ said Willa, a little sad. _‘His name came up_ a lot, _and it didn’t sound good. Is he…dangerous?’_

Raylan sighed. He didn’t believe in justifying himself to his twelve year old child, but that seemed to be what he was doing. ‘Listen kiddo, don’t worry about me. I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t believe it, but he’s different. Poses as much danger to me as I do to him.’

_‘That’s…weirdly ambiguous. Okay.’_

‘You met him, do you honestly think I’d set a dangerous man on my child? Please. Boyd’s changed, he’s…he’s walking into a lake.’

_‘What?’_

‘I’ve got to go, sorry — talk to you later? Okay, bye kid,’ said Raylan as she gave him a confused farewell. Sure enough, as he put away his phone there was Boyd waist deep in the lake-water. Not a trick of the light. He might have pre-emptively asserted Boyd’s difference in character, for as he walked to the water’s edge it seemed that the man was still as fucking inconstant as Winona made him out to be. 

‘Boyd,’ he called, ‘What in the fuck are you doin’?’

Boyd turned, grinning wide enough to split his face. ‘You got eyes, son, think you know how to make use of ‘em. Come on,’ he said, a sales pitch offset somewhat by his violent shivering and the faint mist hovering at the water’s surface. 

‘Yeah, I can see you’ve lost your mind. I ain’t joinin’ you in some ball-freezin’ enterprise just cause you took a notion for it.’

‘Remember Cumberland Hollow?’ hectored Boyd, and the image of the two of them sluicing the mine-dust off in a mountain-spring pool darkened Raylan’s memory. ‘That was plenty colder than this. It’s bracin’.’ He swilled his hands over the lake face, barely rippling the water, and his expression took on some of its blank stillness as he said, almost to himself, _‘All water is a salutary flood and a rich and full washing away of sins._ Absolution in ablution. _’_

Raylan shook his head. ‘I’m not baptisin’ you. Don’t know how bein’ a born again born-again even works. Besides, don’t you need to be certified by Jesus or something?’ 

Arguing with Boyd about theological minutiae had always been a foolish act. Boyd in his element, water up to his elbows looking at Raylan like they were comfortably talking about God over a beer and not locked in some strange battle of wills waist-deep in the middle of nowhere. ‘I asked if you believed in God, once, Raylan,’ he said. ‘At the time you fobbed me off with some child’s imaginin’ of an old man in the sky, that sort of thing. Do you know what it is you believe?’

The well of defensiveness steeping his voice a betrayal as he said, ‘In truth, Boyd, I think that’s one of the most personal things you can ask a man,’ and Boyd nodded in something like triumph. 

Raylan frowned. He had never had Boyd’s propensity for belief, his capricious search for meaning; he ignored it, when he could, and hoped that he was justified for all the shit that he ever did. Their push and pull extended even to this: Boyd certain, he stepping back to watch the inevitable fallout. Deeply unexplainable then, why he chose to shrug off his coat and step into the freezing water.

_‘Fuck!’_ Raylan hissed. The water crept up his legs as he waded in towards Boyd, who stood waiting with his pants soaked and shirt beginning to stick to his skin. ‘Just what am I humourin’ you for, again?’ 

‘Because you have been God’s instrument in my life,’ said Boyd, like this was plain as day, like it wasn’t two shades close to being bona fide alarming. As if being responsible for Boyd’s various leaps of faith was something Raylan would want to be responsible for. ‘I don’t claim that this’ll pass as legitimate in the eyes of any church out there, but in the eyes of God? Who knows.’ He looked at Raylan and held up his arms to the sky in question. Even with his cuffs buttoned the shape of his forearms was clear under the material. 

‘No one talks like that,’ Raylan said, ducking his eyes to watch the water creeping up his trousers and thinking it odd as the lack of feeling in his legs began to give way to something akin to warmth. ‘No one says shit like y _ou’re God’s instrument_ , you know that right? This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever had convinced me to do.’ Water lapping at his thighs. A bird called, way out on the lake, and even though he didn’t believe in the exact ritual that Boyd was reenacting it sent a calm sweeping through him. Like all this meant something. 

‘Repeat after me, then dunk me under,’ Boyd said. 

‘Already done my best to make sure you sin no more. Makes this seem like overkill,’ said Raylan and Boyd cracked a crooked grin, as if the image of his punctured chest and near death were genuinely funny and not a dark turning point of their relationship. An uncomfortable chuckle escaped Raylan’s chest. ‘Ready?’ he asked.

‘Ready. Raylan Givens, if you’d repeat after me: I baptise this man, Boyd Crowder…’ 

And Raylan said the words, feeling a little ridiculous, the image of standing in church next to Winona all those years ago leaping unbidden to mind. ‘In the name of the Father, Spirit and Son…’ 

Boyd’s eyes black and serious on him as he continued, ‘…so that by means of this saving flood all that has been born in him from Adam…and of which he himself has added thereto may be drowned in him and engulfed.’ This last a bit of a mouthful, and he stumbled on the phrasing but it didn’t shake Boyd’s steady intensity. 

‘Do you confess your faith in Christ Jesus, renouncing the Devil and all his works?’ asked Raylan like the words were his own, and tried and failed to banish all thoughts of Al Pacino as Michael Corleone. 

‘I do.’

And Raylan took Boyd by the shoulders and tipped him back into the water, letting the water rise up. The thought of what this would look like to an observer struck him and he couldn’t help it, he started to laugh as he held Boyd under. How long did it have to be, for God to approve of the job? Long rinse cycle? The shape of Boyd shimmering under the flat reflection of the clouds. The moment stretched on for what felt like years but then he was hauling Boyd upright. Water cascading back to the lake as Boyd surfaced. 

His hair sat plastered to his face; Raylan found his laughter continuing as Boyd shook himself like a dog even though the droplets soaked his own shirt. ‘God-damn!’ Boyd exclaimed, pulled both hands through his hair with a lucid kind of delight. 

The moment so odd and outside any normal state that Raylan didn’t flinch back as Boyd put a wet palm to his shoulder, although some of his laughter stilled as he felt Boyd’s touch seeping into his skin. ‘Thank you,’ Boyd said. The sun shone through his slicked wet hair, turning his ears a translucent red. He let his hand fall and they made their way towards shore in silence. Water steaming and streaming from their bodies. 

Like those days in Cumberland Hollow, it was the best kind of chill that sent them into silence on the drive home. Almost holy. 

When Sarah looked at them later her face creased in confusion and laughter. ‘If you aim to drown a man you need to hold him down till he stops moving,’ she pointed out. ‘Just so you know, for next time.’

 

* * *

 

Through his sparse apartment decor, Boyd displayed the kind of asceticism that came to annoy Raylan the longer the other man insisted on sleeping on the damn couch. Not that that Boyd would settle for sharing the mattress with Raylan; not that Raylan would want such a thing. The apartment gave off the impression of being freshly occupied even months into the lease; no personal touches to speak of save the scant belongings and clothing arranged in one corner as if ready for imminent flight. It was like his presence was the one thing shaking this rigorous order, like Raylan was the only thing in the room Boyd would not be able to leave without second thought in event of a house fire. The thought unsettled him.

There was no discussion over their arrangement, the silent consensus seeming to be that this was a temporary thing until Raylan relinquished the bed and decided just what he was doing with his life. It came as a surprise then, the delivery man and a flatpack box at the intercom one day. 

Raylan abandoned Boyd’s battered copy of _The Monkey Wrench Gang_ and a half-drunk glass of Elmore T, still caught up in the fanciful notion of Boyd reinvented as an ecoterrorist and therefore unprepared for the news that his new bed was ready to be installed as he opened the front door. 

‘My what now?’

‘Order for Raylan Givens?’ the man said, holding out a printed paper. ‘We do the installation as well, part of the price.’

Raylan cursed himself for leaving both his gun and his reading glasses upstairs. Thoughts of Winona, the rocking chair and a fucking Detroit man in his own home popped into his head every time he set foot in IKEA let alone at a stranger appearing to assemble mysterious furniture. ‘Sure,’ he said, hoping this was some inscrutable act of Boyd. ‘My memory ain’t what it used to be. Come on up.’ 

Raylan recognised the kid with the piercings — the bakery protege and brother of a fresh prison inmate — as the kid ambled by the doorway and asked, ’You need a hand, Mr. Givens?’ 

‘Appreciate the offer. Eli, right?’ 

‘Yeah.’ The boy was skinny but took the weight of the box well enough, and he and the delivery man managed to wrestle the thing upstairs while Raylan stood around feeling like a dick. Might as well have been fainting and clutching his side seeing how quick the kid stepped in to help. They came back down again for the mattress and lugged it inside.

‘You tryin’ out for the helpin’-the-elderly scout badge?’ Raylan asked as he limped up the stairs behind them.

The kid deposited his end of the mattress against the wall and frowned; took him a moment to cotton on to Raylan’s pointed glance at his pin-covered denim jacket, and when he did he just shrugged and ducked his head to hide a faint blush. ‘Thought you could use a hand is all,’ Eli said. ‘Since…you got shot and all, facing off my fucking brother.’

Raylan levelled a long look at him and took a sip of bourbon. ‘We paint everyone who got shitty kin with the same brush I’d be tarred and feathered long ago,’ he said. ‘Ain’t your fault what happened, no more than it’s Boyd’s or this gentleman here’s fault.’ He gestured to the delivery man. ‘That bein’ said, by rule of thumb Boyd’s always at least halfway culpable…but the principle still stands.’ 

‘Uh-huh,’ said the kid and made for the door with a stilted wave. The delivery man was busy stripping open the cardboard and laying out wooden slats, intent but flashing up curious glances at Raylan every now and then like the fabled gunshot might start leaking blood there and then. It took him a good twenty minutes to put the whole thing together after Eli left; Raylan was just starting to enjoy the his book (invalid status notwithstanding) when the man got to his feet and slapped his hands together with a grin.

‘All done, sir. You want me to get rid of that old mattress for you?’

‘Seein’ as I’m fixin’ to continue sleepin’ on it, no thank you,’ Raylan said, and slipped a tip into the man’s front pocket. ‘Much obliged. Five stars on your shitty corporation’s website.’ The man left, a little nonplussed, and Raylan sat on the couch and stared at the bed. The bed stood there, solid and homey — probably the only concession Boyd had made in regards to furniture in two decades.As foreign as moon rock in the room.

‘See you’re gettin’ soft,’ Raylan said when Boyd got in but he got nothing but a blinding flash of teeth in return as the man moved past him into the kitchen. When he stepped into the room after his shower that evening, he found his things laid out on the bed and Boyd resolutely spread out on the shitty mattress in the corner. ‘Boyd,’ said Raylan to the dark shock of hair poking out from the bedsheets below. ‘Boyd. I’m not takin’ your goddamn bed.’ 

A sigh rippled out from the floor. ‘Don’t believe humans got the capability to sleep upright like adraft horse, but I’d be mighty impressed to see you try, Raylan,’ grunted Boyd without rolling over. ‘Let me know how it goes.’

‘Asshole. Hate to break it too you, but I ain’t so fragile so as to fuckin’ unravel from sleepin’ on the floor. God forbid I do anything more strenuous, like, I don’t know, bendin’ over to put on my boots or take a shit or whatever else I do every day without you there to hold my hand.’

‘Mmhm.’ 

‘Listen, I ain’t takin’ it.’ 

It had to be the only time in his life he saw Boyd Crowder choose silence as means to win an argument. Raylan took the bed. 

 

* * *

 

He went to Miami a few weeks later, found Boyd stretched out asleep on the other side of the double bed when he got in from his return flight. Raylan lay down fully clothed on top of the covers — too tired to even kick off his boots — and Boyd stirred beside him: just a man after all, not so stoic-like as to resist the lure of a comfortable night’s sleep. 

It only happened the once. A victory nonetheless. 

 

* * *

 

For two men who spent more time than most trying to kill one another, the arrangement worked out pretty well. Raylan came and went, dividing his time between Oregon and Florida for weeks at a time. It took until the warmer shift in the weather for them to have a full-blown argument. Boyd supposed he should have seen it coming; the unsaid thing bubbling up between them until one of them erupted, but came as a surprise that he was the one to break.

He thought himself to be at terms with Raylan’s presence, resigned to ignore the old dangerous thoughts that surfaced whenever he focused too hard on the absurdity of their cohabitation. Willing to let Raylan be. But then again he was, if nothing else, a man of action.

Raylan was driving Boyd’s truck and Boyd sat watching him drive. The landscape was strip of new greenery and blue sky beyond, flying past as the wind ruffled Raylan’s hair through the open window. It was a beautiful day yet still Boyd felt the anger hard in his chest, and no matter how he tried the feeling would not go away. He was tired of watching. Wondering.

They pulled into a gas station an hour past Eugene, a faded pink motel fronting the scuffed tarmac beyond. Raylan checked his phone, stretched, and made to get out of the truck. 

‘What are we doin’?’ asked Boyd, dropping the words slow and heavy. 

‘Gettin’ gas. Thought that was obvious.’ 

He knew Raylan had his gun tucked into the back of his jeans, and maybe that spurred him on as he said, ‘No. I mean what are you doin’ here.’ At least there was always that assurance, Raylan with a gun and the ability to put Boyd down. 

Raylan checked himself, gave a businessman’s chuckle. ‘Answer’s still the same,’ he said. ‘What’s your deal? Your altered mood ain’t alleviatin’ my need for gas nor the restroom.’ He flicked his eyes to the wing-mirror, checking out the motel entrance and the few pedestrians outside. 

‘No, Raylan, I mean what are you doin’ _here_?’ said Boyd, baring the question like a blade. ‘Really. Man like you don’t just give up, run away from his family cause he got nothing better to do. You here cause we’re old buddies, huh? That truly it?’

‘Didn’t know a man had to have some higher purpose to existence in your presence. Where’s this comin’ from?’

‘I wish you’d get around to what you come here for, whatever that may be. You ain’t never been a man to come at something edgeways.’

Raylan reacted to his tone, face hardening. ‘I ain’t crab-walkin’ at anything,’ he said. ‘You’re the one worked up ‘bout something you better go ahead and say, before I lose my patience.’ 

‘Alright then,’ said Boyd, letting some of his frustration slip out in the guise of anger. ‘Seein’ as you’re not the type to leave a job half-done, Raylan, it would be remiss of me not to wonder if you’re playin’ the long game.’

Raylan quit fiddling with the rearview mirror; he looked darkly surprised. ‘You think I’m tryin’ to send you back inside?’

‘Seems like an awful lot of trouble, waitin’ around for a slip-up,’ admitted Boyd with a half-laugh, without much humour. ‘But if you want to pick up the threads where we left off, why all you got to do is ask. You want to know who killed Tom Hagan, or Hut McKean or whatever his real name was? How about our friend Dewey Crowe — I’m sure you been dyin’ to ask about him.’ Raylan’s face was creased with something akin to disgust but Boyd found himself unable to stop. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Lies all but dried up on this forked tongue of mine.’

‘You hear me askin’ about that shit?’ said Raylan. ‘Even once these past weeks? I don’t want to know.’

‘Hah. Thought you were keepin’ score, tallying up my crimes.’ 

‘Is it so much beyond you to imagine that maybe I don’t know what I’m doin’ here? _I don’t know,’_ hissed Raylan. The words halted his anger; he toyed with the hat in his lap while the possibilities of the statement opened up between them. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he continued, accusatory. ‘Comin’ at me with that shit: if I wanted to land you in the joint you’d be eatin’ commissary tuna out of a can by now.’ 

It was much for him to admit, Boyd could see that. He felt ashamed. ‘Only other reason…’ he said, quietly, thinking of the old feelings and the new; of waking to Raylan in the morning and hearing him breathe near him at night. ‘I swore I’d never mention to your face. Some things better left unsaid.’ 

‘Since when have _you_ been one to avoid goin’ head-on at something? Tell me that,’ spat Raylan, tone as hard and flat as hammered steel. ‘Find it hard to think of a time you refrained from doin’ exactly as you like.’

Boyd leaned back and looked him full in the face, the memory of his teenage self coming to mind. Their shoulders brushing against each other as they rode the cage up into the sunlight that last day in the doghole, shaking with adrenaline and fear, Raylan’s hand still clutched in his sweaty grip like a millstone set to pull him down into deep water. What came after. 

‘Oh,’ he said easily, with bite, ‘I can think of exactly one time that if I had acted we’d of both not left Harlan living.’ 

Raylan frowned.

‘If you don’t know, Raylan, I don’t feel inclined to tell you. But I suspected you knew, back then. I suspected that was why you left.’

He could see Raylan’s anger ebb a little, the man squinting into the distance as he took in Boyd’s meaning and the silence seeped into the truck. ‘We’ve never talked about that,’ he finally said. ‘Thought afterwards it was mostly in my head. Only time I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt.’

‘How magnanimous of you.’ Even if he himself had been able to convince himself his feelings had been boyish fancy: foolish and dangerous sentimentality and nothing more. 

‘All that shit we did,’ Raylan said with bitter humour. ‘I remember facin’ off those mine-corp thugs at the picket lines with only a tyre-iron like nothing could put us down, but I was never as scared as I was all those times you looked at me like you were goin’ to…y’know.’

‘Raylan Givens, afraid?’

‘Afraid as the day the mountain came down on us. I find it remarkable that you had such a level of restraint at that age.’ 

Boyd swallowed and tried not to think of what would have happened if Raylan had stayed, what he might have done. ‘There was a moment I thought, right when you beat me down that last day,’ he said. ‘I knew looking up at you with all that anger and fear comin’ off you in waves that it would be so easy to change your mind. I thought, this boy will stay if I ask. If I act.’ 

‘Coulda just knocked you about a bit more. Hit the state line by sundown regardless.’ 

‘I don’t mean to place my ardent approaches in such high regard, but no, I don’t think you would. Not then anyway.’ Boyd dragged a hand through his hair and forced a short laugh. ‘That feeling was put to bed when you shot me — a man might talk of one thing and feel another, but when you fired that gun I thought, he really means it. His feelings are against me.’ 

A dull redness flushed slowly up Raylan’s neck and ears. When he spoke his words came harsh, choked with anger and a tinge of something more fearful. ‘Just what are we talkin about, Boyd?’

‘The past, son. What else is there to talk about?’

‘Plenty.’ 

‘Raylan. At risk of repeatin’ myself, what are you _doin’_ here? _’_ asked Boyd, gesturing to the truck cab and the gas station beyond. Meaning the state. Meaning at his side. ‘What is there, if you ain’t gunnin’ for me or I for you? You ain’t been one to plan the future since you laid that baseball scholarship into Dickie Bennet’s knee, and contrary to belief I am not aimin’ to force your hand. Took nearly twenty-five years for you to admit the fact of our friendship and I ain’t in the mood to hear you deny this. But you got some reckonin’ to do with yourself.’

‘Shut up,’ grunted Raylan, seeming close to grinding his own teeth in frustration. ‘Just shut up.’

‘If that’s what you want.’

‘ _This_ has never been possible, so don’t act like it is.’ 

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Boyd levelly. ‘Everyone got a choice to make, Raylan Givens. I admit I have pursued the wrong path in the past but things don’t got to stay the same.’ 

The words landed wrong, despite his gentle tone or perhaps because of it. Raylan baulking angrily like a skittish horse with a death-grip on the door handle, all taut muscle and pointed attack. ‘That why each path ends with the person you love tryin’ to shoot you, huh?’ 

Boyd felt the points of scarred skin rough under his shirt and tried not to rise to the bait. ‘I will charitably attribute those words to the fear in your heart, Raylan, if indeed you’re settlin’ into a recursive role.’ 

‘You make ‘em do it,’ said Raylan. ‘I’m tired. So don’t give me this shit like things could be different.’

He jammed the baseball cap low on his head and yanked the truck-door open. Slammed it shut behind him. Boyd watched him stalk across the gas station yard and enter the shop beyond, all tight shoulders and shifting hips. Raylan didn’t look back.

Boyd pressed both hands to his face and sighed. Tried not to swallow his retort, point out that things had ended up differently when Raylan had elected not to put a bullet in him despite provocation all those years ago. They were changed and changing men, but not changed enough. He slid over to the driver's side and rested his hands on the wheel, but it didn't sit right with him leaving Raylan high and dry.

‘Goddamn it,’ he said, and then the passenger door opened and a figure climbed in — but it was not Raylan come to apologise and repent; that was not his luck. 

Boyd found himself looking down the barrel of yet another gun, the end held in the hand of a blazing-eyed white man in a dirty shirt. Things the same as they ever were, and getting worse as the man pressed his weapon against Boyd’s temple and said, ‘I need you to drive. Now.’ 

The moment stretched out a few seconds as Boyd watched the Raylan’s hat move out of sight through the convenience store window, and he reflected that perhaps Raylan was right. Not that he’d get the opportunity to tell him. If he ended up with a bullet in skull at the side of the road would that mean that he had won or lost their argument, and if so, did it matter? 

‘Son, forgive me, but I have never been less in the mood for this,’ Boyd said, but he reached down and started the engine anyway. It was barely noon but he could feel a tiredness settle deep in his bones.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always thought it was an interesting change between the show dialogue and the original script for Bulletville:
> 
> BOYD  
> Tell me about your God.
> 
> RAYLAN  
> I think that’s about the most  
> private thing in a man’s life.
> 
>  
> 
> Apologies for the erratic update schedule. Comments, as ever, appreciated.


End file.
